Last Friday I had the opportunity to go to the observatory to attempt a few galaxies. I found two in the constellation Leo. Leo is famous for what is called the Leo Triplet. The Leo Triplet consists of three galaxies located in a circle less than 45' in diameter. The triplet is quite easy to find as it sits halfway between two naked eye stars -- Theta and Iota Leonis.
A pair of galaxies appeared in my eyepiece as faint patches of light spread out over several arcminutes. There was a small noticeable asterism of stars in the centre of the view that looked like a checkmark. I used those stars as a guide to identifying the two galaxies. The long end of the checkmark pointed directly to M66. Also, if you were to draw an imaginary line perpendicular to the shorter edge of the checkmark it would intersect M65. My record of the observation is shown below. I do not yet have an image for it as I am waiting for a clear night to attempt a long exposure photograph of the region.
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| M65 Observation Record |
Messier 65 is a spiral galaxy located approximately 35 million light years away from us. An interesting fact is one of the stars in the galaxy went supernova in 2013. It was bright enough to be imaged by amateur astronomers.
I hope to have an opportunity to photograph some galaxies this year. I will need to setup and learn how to use the autoguider. The telescope will also need to be very accurately polar aligned. In order to get a good image several different types of exposures are required. Along with the raw image I will need raw dark frames, bias frames and flat frames. I hope to use this blog to keep a journal of all the steps I take to get a good picture that I can refer back to.
Until I have my own picture see an image below with the associated image credit.
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| Messier 65 (Image credit: ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM. Ack: OmegaCen/Astro-WISE/Kapteyn Institute) |
With 10cm of snow on the way this evening and a cold rainy Spring in the forecast, there may not be ample opportunity for observing. Hopefully the weather improves for the open house at the Rothney Astrophysical Observatory this Saturday!
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