M for Méchain

[David Levi]

I went to the Brecon Beacons again last night. You've got to grab these clear sky opportunities when you can. On arrival at the site, the Moon (showing a fair bit of earthshine) and Venus provided a lovely view in the west.

After observing the Virgo galaxies on the last two occasions, I decided to start in the constellation of Ursa Major and work my way down to Coma Berenices. The observing was done mostly at 58x magnification with the jump up to 125x if I was feeling hopeful to get some more detail. In general though 58x magnification, as I am increasingly finding, produced the best views with my limited available eyepieces.

First on the list was the barred spiral galaxy M108. I started at the star Merak (bottom right of the Ursa Major saucepan) and after a one star hop it came into view. It gives a rather edge on view and therefore appears elongated. The Owl Nebula, M97, was next. It came into view just before M108 left the field of view. Bright, dense, round and of reasonable size I couldn't make out any owl like features even when using my UHC filter and increasing the magnification. However, the combination of these two different objects and a few stars was my favourite sight of the night.

Moving across to the star Phecda on the other side of the bottom of the saucepan and the galaxy M109 is not far away. In fact I had to make sure that Phecda was out of the field of view in order to see M109 properly without being blinded by γ UMa. M109 is about 83 million light years away. I haven't checked all the objects that I have observed but this sounds like the furthest object that I have ever seen.

Moving south I was on the hunt for the intermediate spiral galaxy M106. This wasn't so easy to get to compared with the previous targets.. 5 UMa was just visible naked eye and once that was in the finderscope field of view I moved down to 3 UMa and then further south again and with a little playing about I located M106. It is a lot brighter than M108 and M109.

M94 was next up on my list and I moved to the star Chara, β CVn, to start my search. I found a faint galaxy quite quickly moving east from Chara. This turned out to be NGC4618 and a little further on was the face-on spiral galaxy M94. The core appeared quite dense and bright. I couldn't make out any spiral arms though, just a general haze around the core.

I had a look at the spiral galaxy, M63, known as the Sunflower Galaxy, star hopping from Cor Caroli. Cor Caroli was also my starting point for my hop down to the galaxy NGC 4631, known as the Whale Galaxy. It was large and the imagined whale shape was quite obvious with a slightly brighter belly. I can't say that I saw it's little companion galaxy NGC 4627 but there may have been a hint of it with averted vision. What was clear, however, in the same field of view was the galaxy NGC 4656.

During this trip through the heavens I had been following in the footsteps of Pierre Méchain. An French astronomer, friend and colleague of Charles Messier who discovered about 25 of the Messier catalogue including M63, M94, M97, M106, M108 and M109. Perhaps the M in the catalogue can also be thought of as standing for Méchain as well.

Any initial high hazy cloud had disappeared quite soon after dusk and so I decided to have another go at observing the globular cluster NGC 5053 in the constellation Coma Berenices. Getting to the globular cluster M53 from Alpha Com is quite straight forward. This time I thought I saw a large area to the west of a magnitude 10 star that was slightly brighter than the surrounding space and could be seen by moving the slow motion controls backwards and forwards. Whether this was NGC 5053 I can't really say. The grey smudge, if indeed it was really there, was a lot larger than I was expecting.

Before finishing I couldn't resist revisiting some old friends, galaxies M51, M81, M82 and M101. Bode's Nebulae were just stunning - very bright after all those quite faint galaxies.

If only all observing sessions were like this. A little Moon that quickly left the stage and a long night at a mild temperature.

Clear skies.

[Mr Spock]

Nice report. Sounds like a really good night. It's a change to have the weather to go with it.

[domstar]

Wonderful. It seems we have the same interests (although my frac doesn't like pointing up as high as you were). Interesting about Mechain too. I also like hearing about stuff people didn't find (or weren't sure about). A thoroughly enjoyable read.

[David Levi]

Well spotted @domstar with regard to the elevation. My equatorial mount doesn't like pointing straight up either. To use the straight through finderscope you have to be a contortionist. Luckily my back and neck held out .

[alan potts]

Very nice report, lovely part of the country that I can still remember from a school holiday there in 1969 at Llangrose, I believe it is still a popular area with a nice lake.