Leo, the Lion of the springtime skies, presents a wonderful view out of our Milky Way galaxy and into the depths of intergalactic space. Each of those small red ovals in the chart presented here is a separate galaxy, each with anywhere between 100 billion to 200+ billion stars! This is a big universe, and Leo is an excellent window to that. I have known amateurs astronomers to spend an entire night observing in this region of sky. All you need is an 8" telescope and a dark, moonless night.
Saturn: This year we have the interloper, Saturn, present in Leo. When you are tired of searching for those faint and fuzzy galaxies, take a break and look at this lovely ringed world.
M-95: A barred sprial of magnitude 9.7, which makes it a relatively easy object to find. It is well condensed with a faint outer ring, which really are the spiral arms.
M-96: Just a bit to the east of M-95, this is a fine spiral galaxy at magnitude 9.3 making it another easy find. See if you can fit it into the same field of view with M-95.
M-105: This galaxy is to the north of M-96 and a bit to the east. You can star hop all of these. One neat thing about M-105, is that you know you've found it when you see not one, but three galaxies in the field of view. This group consists of M-105 (mag 10.2), NGC 3371 (mag 9.9) and NGC 3389 (mag 11.8). The first two are elliptical galaxies while NGC 3389 is a spiral. With larger telescope, you might see a few more faint fuzzies in the same field, but the brightest of these is in the magnitude 17 range... not easy to see.
Moving to the east, you will come to another neat group of galaxies to investigate. M-65, a magnitude 9.2 spiral is an easy find, and to its east is M-66, a magnitude 8.9 spiral which is a bit more face-on. Use higher-than-expected magnifications to see if you can discern any details. To the north of M-66 is an often overlooked object, NGC 3628, a magnitude 9.6 edge-on spiral with a tremendous dust lane running through it. Don't miss this wonderful object.
Want a test of dark skies and a good telescope? See if you can spot the galaxy Leo-I which resides just 20 arc-minutes north of the star Regulus. You have to keep Regulus out of your field of view, or you will not see this faint, large magnitude 11.2 elliptical galaxy.
| Contents | What's Up | Blog | Papers | Photos |
| Links | Observations | Spectra | Sketches |
Last Modified: 3/02/08 11:10a
This page: © Copyright 1997-2008 by John A. Blackwell