M79 Just a question ?

[vemarstar]

Hello fellow stargazers.

I'm going through the messier list , and i was thinking of M79 ...is this globular like M13, M15, or is it very small in eyepiece ? i was looking the other night with no result the moon was half full which probably did not help.

If it is very small ....? what magnification will it take ....i know it is very low in the sky...... looks a difficult object.

Any advice welcome ... from Ian

[russ]

According to the stats it covers half as much sky as say M13 and two thirds of M92. So it's going to be a small glob. But at mag 7.7 shouldn't be too hard to spot. Actually the stats are comparable to M56 in Lyra. Both are close to magnitude 8 and their size around 9 arc minutes. But M79 has a brighter core, so should be easier to spot.

One to add to the growing 'to be observed' list.

[Astroman]

M79 is a bit smaller and denser than M56, but yes, they are fairly close in dark skies. This was one of the last Messier's I found first time through, so it can be tricky. I use the two central stars in Lepus as a guide. They point almost directly at M79, which is just about the same distance from the bottom one as the stars are from each other. Just a tad east, and there you are. In the C8, about 220x shows a nice dense core with a cloud of outlying stars. The 20" shows it resolved to the core at 350x and very complex, 3d type viewing.

Go get it!