Four Easy Messiers with Binoculars
One of my current goals is to see all 110 of the Messier object with my Canon 15×50IS binoculars and I’m closing in on my last few. It turns out that I had 1 more in Virgo to find (not countly the pesky M91 which will take a special effort to find), 1 in Coma Berenices. I should have grabbed these a few days ago when I was “doing” Virgo. But I only had zoomed in chart with me, so I didn’t see the bigger picture.
To grab M61, in Virgo, I did not start at Vindemiatrix, like last time. When you start there you go up and to find M61 you need to go down, way down. Instead I started at Zaniah, or Eta Virginis, moderatly bright star with magnitude 3.85. I like starting points that I can easily see with my naked eye and this one was close to M61. I then followed the patterns showing in Astromist until I reached M61 vicinity and M61’s smudge was easily seen. (And yes, it really helps to have dark skies!)
Way up high in the sky was Coma Berenices, the first “new” constellation to me from Truro. I remember seeing Melotte 111, naked eye, one night when we first moved here and and wondering just what was that? I’m in Coma B to find M64, the “Black-Eye Galaxy,” called such because of the great dust cloud obscuring the center. This was a hard hop. I moved down and towards the center, looking for the two counter curving lines of stars. Once I found those I went up to mag 5.0 star, and then located the line of 3 mag 7 stars above M64. M64 was quite easily seen between these two guideposts.
Next was the globular M68, which is almost in a straght line from “left” two stars of Corvus. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of Corvus until I went to find M68. And what’s up with Alpha Corvii being dimmer than Beta? And to be completely honest, M68 isn’t even in Corvus, it is in the sky hogging constellation Hydra. But, back to M68. It was bright and easy to find, a tiny dim smudge in the binoculars.
And my last target for the night was M104, the Sombrero Galaxy. I also started in Corvus but when up. This is a very easy grab folks. Corvus is dim, but easy to spot. Then you go up to quite a distinctive Y-shaped pattern of stars, ending with a small cluster of 3 or 4 stars. Then a tiny jump up to a big mess of stars, with 3 in a straght line that point almost directly at the pencil thin line that is M104.
And then, just before shutting down for the night, I found M5 again, this time without the fog. My, that’s a bright object, quite nice.
I now hav 102 Messier object, only 8 more to go!