M74/M77

[Walshie79]

So it's the first clear night in ages and time to give the binoculars a test. Having swung around the usuals earlier (M31/32/110, Double Cluster, Cygnus and M33 which was fairly easy tonight) I decided to try for M74 in Pisces, which was near the meridian.

First up at least it's easy to find where to look. Hamal and Sheratan point straight at eta Psc which was quite easy to see naked eye. It looks distinctly orange in binoculars. To the left are two stars about 6th mag and maybe 2deg or so apart. The elusive object is between them and a little right. There are also two 7th or 8th mag stars which point straight to it from the NW. After about 10 minutes of searching I thought I caught a smudge intermittently with averted vision, then looked about 3 times more and the same happened. Check the charts, it's in the right place. By about the 8th look it was clearly there, but I still couldn't see it directly, only averted, best by focusing on a square shape of faint (9-10 mag?) stars just to the right. Kept looking for about another 10 minutes and it was definitely the one. Like a large and ghostly M1 it was, easily the hardest Messier I've tried. M101 is easy by comparison.

Then down into Cetus to try M77. This one was a doddle by comparison, I saw it at the first glance. What appears in 25x70s could easily be mistaken for a faint globular cluster, forming a triangle with delta Cet and a pair of stars to the north. I might have thought it more difficult before trying M74...

[Paul73]

M74 is a good catch. You must have some good dark sky there. It isn't much more than a faint smear of haze in my 10". It certainly helps that there are some easily recognisable stars close by to work from.

Paul

[BinocularSky]

Practice finding both if you ever intend to try a Messier Marathon: they are among the first "evening twilight" objects you need to nab.