Andromeda Galaxy (M31 with M32 & M110)

There are a great many things about the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) that make it notable. It's the closest major galaxy to us which also makes it the most distant thing you can see (barely) with your naked eye. It's strikingly similar our own Milky Way in that we're both spirals and have some smaller satellite galaxies that orbit around us. The Andromeda / Milky Way 'complex' forms what we refer to as 'The Local Group' of galaxies along with M33 (the dotted circle above Triangulum in the diagram below).

In the 1920s when astronomer Edwin Hubble was trying to find out the distances to galaxies he was able to find a very specific kind of variable star that the absolute brightness of which was known well and then able to calculate that these 'nebula' (as they were referred to at the time) were really a lot farther away than anybody thought and after his research we understood the universe to be a lot bigger than was previously thought!

How to view

M31 is really big in the sky, you can barely fit it all in the eyepiece at low power. However the outskirts of this thing are very dim so unless you have a truly large scope; don't worry about the edges–you won't see anything there anyway. About 100x is good for this one.

What to look for

The main thing you'll see is the fuzzball of the nucleus of M31. You should also be able to see the linear glow that defines the orientation of the spiral arms that stretch away from the nucleus in opposite directions.

There are two easily visible satellite galaxies of M31, one more so than the other. In the same field of view as the nucleus you should be able to see, just above the spiral arm glow, a fairly compact but fuzzy, round thing–that would be M32. Also visible is larger, fainter NGC205 (M110) which you'll find on the opposite side of the arms, directly below the nucleus; look carefully…

The Double Cluster in Perseus

The "Double Cluster" in Perseus is visible to the naked eye as a glow of light that's easy to find along a line projected from the two stars Navi and Rachbah in Cassiopeia towards the bright star Mirfak in Perseus.

These clusters are populated with 175-200 hot young stars and are between 3.2 and 5.6 million years old which makes them quite young. The brightest members are almost all the way to the top of the star hotness scale as B type with only O type being hotter.

They're about 7000 light years away from us headed out towards the edge of our side of the galaxy, but are only a few hundred light years away from each other. Both of these clusters are actually coming towards us at an average rate of 21.5 kilometers per second.

What to look for

The Double Cluster is a very large object and shows up best in a low power view; anything more than 33x and you won't be able to fit both clusters in the same field of view.

I've always felt that when looking at star clusters, particularly open ones, that getting the ‘context’ right is important. If you use too much magnification and completely fill the field of view with the cluster you don't get the effect of ‘a cluster of stars sitting in space’ so I recommend low power views at first, especially for this large double object.

Once you've seen it low power, bump up to about 100x and have a look at each cluster individually and make some comparisons like which one seems more compact etc. Don't forget to look for the dark red star between the two (easy to see in the photo above).

The Pleiades (M45)

The Pleiades (also known as ‘the seven sisters’) is a beautiful bright open cluster in the constellation of Taurus.

A keen naked eye view will reveal six major stars that a lot of people say resemble a very little ‘dipper’ with a short handle. In the small telescope or binoculars it will seem like nine or ten major stars with a total count of 30-50 depending on how much time you want to spend counting them. The true number of stars associated with this cluster is actually over a thousand according to researchers.

The Pleiades is primarily made of nearby (420 light-years) hot young stars and is moving very quickly through our local part of the galaxy headed in the general direction of the constellation Orion. As the Pleiades stars age, the cluster will gradually disperse and the individual members will take up their positions in the spiral arm of the Milky Way to live out the rest of their lives; kind of like a gang of teenagers with fast cars who fall in love and settle down with respectable jobs and an SUV!

What to Look for

A telescopic view of the Pleiades will reveal many more major stars, somewhere between 25 and 40 depending on the size of your scope and the seeing conditions however this one would look good even from New York City!

Low magnification is the key here–use your best low power wide-field eyepiece; I can barely fit the whole cluster into the field of view at 33x with my setup; 15x binoculars are actually the best way to view this in my opinion.

M42–The Great Orion Nebula

The Great Orion Nebula is one of the best ‘showpiece’ objects out there for amateur astronomers; it's bright, easy to locate, offers a wealth of detail at a variety of magnifications. First visible late in the evening in late Autumn, Orion will hang high in the sky all Winter with it's crisp viewing conditions.

How to Find It

The Orion Nebula is the middle ‘star’ in Orion's sword which (like almost all of Orion) is an area full of hydrogen and is easily visible with the naked eye. When the Hubble Space Telescope was launched it looked at M42 for evidence of early solar systems to confirm our theories about how solar systems form.

What to Look For

In binoculars or a low power telescopic view you can see the entire ‘sword’ region which consists of three areas of cloudy nebulosity, the middle one of which is M42.

After bumping up the magnification to 70x-100x you should have a field-filling view of this magnificent stellar nursery. The most obvious thing is the ‘Trapezium’ of stars in the very center which make very good objects to fine-tune your focus.

The most obvious parts of the nebula will be the super bright area in the photo above and the dark area opposite the trapezium. Once you're used to seeing that, then try and find the boundaries of the ‘arms’ that reach out on either side; there are some well defined edges here that are pretty easy to see. Try and trace these out as far as you can; you might have to move the scope to get all the way out to the end.

Now for the difficult part, trying to see some of the detail in the wide ‘fan’ part of this thing. If M42 is high in the sky you should be able to detect some of the mottling of the gas sheet in that region but it won't be easy if you're observing from significant light pollution. I've found that M42 responds very well to the Lumicon UHC and Oxygen3 filters for seeing more detail in the gas and de-emphasizing the stars.

Finally, get up into the high power ranges of your scope, around 200x and see if you can spot a 5th star in the trapezieum, then go touring around the bright areas looking for even more subtle detail. If you don't spend at least fifteen minutes on this one, you're not really looking!

Galaxies M81 & M82

These two springtime galaxies are rewarding in a number of ways for the amateur astronomer. One is the thrill of the chase (unless you have a GoTo system of course) because they are out in an area of the sky with no nearby bright guidepost stars to start from.

The other is seeing two reasonably bright galaxies in the same field of view that are both about 40 million light years away that have such different characteristics. It's great to see them both and then drill down and see how much you can see in them individually.

How to find them

The way I always found them was to find the bowl of the big dipper and then draw a line from the lower right (SE) star to the upper left (NW) star and then keep going that same direction about the same distance as between the two bowl stars. That should get you in the neighborhood; then with a 30x view search the area for a couple of smudges which won't be super obvious at first so don't hurry; move/look, move/look. If you have to go more than tree eyepiece fields and don't find it then go back to your first spot and search the other direction this time. If you line up this spot carefully with your eye and the finder scope you shouldn't be any farther away than three eyepiece fields in any direction.

What to Look for

Once you've found them (yay) in a low power view (50x to 75x) you should be able to see both galaxies and notice their different shapes. M81 is a beautiful classic spiral galaxy and you should be able to see the nucleus distinctly and a hint of the oval nature of the galaxy body and which way it's leaning.

M82 should actually be the more obvious of the two even though it's smaller since it's viewed edge-on and therefore presents a very well-defined, dense shape. Viewed through the scope it's kind of like a ‘fat line’ in the sky which gives rise to it's popular name as the ‘Cigar Galaxy’. Judging from all the activity at the center of this galaxy you could also make the case for the name ‘Exploding Cigar Galaxy’ but that's just my 2¢…

Zooming In

Galaxies at this distance (12 mly) will take all the magnification you can throw at them so try viewing each one individually at 150x or so. Remember the guideline of 35x to 50x for each inch of scope aperture as a point where more magnification is going to look bigger but with a much worse image quality. This might be a good time to experiment with your high magnification setups and see where things start to turn into mud.

Start with M82 and look carefully to see if you can see any of the opposite direction disturbances coming from the center of this galaxy; they won't look red like in the photo but you should be able to see a bit of the projection outward. M82 is a very active galaxy getting the designation a ‘Starburst’ galaxy. It is about five times more luminous than the whole Milky Way and has a center one hundred times more luminous than our galaxy's center! There have been three obvious supernovas in M82 since I've been doing amateur astronomy.

M81 is far more delicate but will yield some detail if you look closely. Once you've really centered in on the nucleus start looking along the long direction of the overall galaxy ‘oval’ and see if you can discern the hard edge defined by the inside of each major galaxy arm and then see how far out you can trace their curvatures.

‘Observing Faint Things’ Tips

If you're not quite sure you're seeing some faint detail, reach up and tap the scope with your fingers just enough to make it wiggle. If the thing you're not sure you're seeing moves in concert with the rest of the image, you actually are seeing it!

Also, don't ‘stare down’ objects; keep your eye moving around your target area and see if you don't get fleeting glimpses of detail that seem less obvious or disappear entirely when you stare straight at them. This is called using averted vision; it allows an area of your eye that is more sensitive to faint light to come into play while observing.

M44, the ‘Beehive’ Cluster

This is a truly gigantic open star cluster filled with big bright stars, widely spaced stars. If you had trouble finding M81 & M82 fear not, this cluster is for you!

How to find it

M44 is in the Zodiacal constellation of Cancer, which is sandwiched in there between Gemini and Leo. None of the main stars that outline Cancer are particularly bright but if you have an idea what you're looking for it's not that hard to pick up.

Once you've found the center star of Cancer (I kind of visualize this one as a ‘running man’ kinda thing) look just above (North) with your lowest power eyepiece setup which, if it's more than 40x you are probably getting a nice close view, too close in fact since some cluster members are probably outside the field of view. You might find that the best view of M44 is in your finder scope or binoculars.

What to Look For

Sometimes it's fun to look for star patterns inside the open clusters. Open cluster M11 is called the Wild Duck cluster because of an internal star pattern that looks like the ‘V’ of ducks or geese flying in formation. There are lots of nice little lines and curves in the star pattern of the Beehive, enjoy them.

While you're in the neighborhood, try tracking down open Cluster M67 to the Southwest.

Also the Beehive lies pretty much right on the ecliptic which is the general path that the Sun, Moon and planets take as they move through our sky. The Moon regularly occults (passes in front of) M44.

M8–The Lagoon Nebula

Nestled near the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy lies a whole bunch of deep sky objects, one of which is M8 the Lagoon Nebula. It is technically a naked-eye object, a smudge in the glow of the Milky Way hovering at the brink of invisibility around Magnitude 6.

Virtually everything on this map chart is a rewarding target except for perhaps PCG 4689212 which is actually one of our dwarf galaxies, very close, on the other side of the Milky Way. It's so large and diffuse that you'll never see it.

To give you a reference point to find M8 I have shown the famous ‘teapot’ asterism and you can find any one of a number of ways to find this thing; it's clearly visible in your finder scope and is fairly large. Use an eyepiece setup that gives you 30x-50x magnification

What to Look For

The Lagoon Nebula is actually quite a bargain, it's three objects with only one name! think of the time you'll save! The Lagoon nebula consists of an open star cluster (NGC 6530), a reflection nebula lit up by star ‘9 Sagittarius’ and a Dark Nebula meandering between them–the actual ‘lagoon’ in the Lagoon Nebula!

The easiest thing to see at first will be the open star cluster NGC 6530, a beautiful cluster of thirty brand new stars that have just finished forming and lighting up from all of the gas and dust from the nebula itself.

Once you've had a good look at that, move it off to the left and up a little bit in your field of view to allow more of the reflection nebula into the picture. Try and see how far out away from the bright stars in the region you can trace its presence.

A Reflection Nebula is one that reflects starlight to us from nearby bright stars like a mirror made out of hydrogen as a opposed to an Emission Nebula which is itself actually glowing from high energy sources in its immediate neighborhood.

Now that you can see the nebula, start looking in between the star cluster and the nebula for a dark lane that swoops in between them; there are some fairly well defined edges here that with some practice should be quite rewarding viewing; see how far you can trace the dark lane and which sides are more visible.

There are a whole bunch of things here to look at, M20 the Trifid Nebula is just a short hop north and M7 is a gigantic open star cluster best observed below 20x or in binoculars. M69 and M70 are both dense globular clusters that are dim but concentrated and rewarding, easy to find too. A real showpiece is M22, a naked eye globular cluster which is the third brightest in the sky and you should also visit M54 because it's the only globular cluster that you can see that's not in the Milky Way, it's actually in that dwarf galaxy PCG 4689212.