The Andromeda Galaxy

As the autumn nights are drawing quicker, I had the opportunity last week to have a longer stargazing session. I also got the chance to try out my new Revelation Astro Photo-Visual Eyepiece Kit which I recently bought. This has a good range of eyepieces and should be better than the ones that came with my telescope. The plan is that I can continue to use these whenever I upgrade my telescope for a bigger and better one. This kit also includes a moon filter, which I need and some of the eyepieces are specifically designed to use with cameras. Astrophotography is definitely something I would like to get into at some point.

M31 - The Andromeda Galaxy

As the autumn season moves on, the Pegasus constellation is rising earlier and goes higher at a reasonable time. Somewhat attached to the Great Square of Pegasus is the constellation of Andromeda. This is home to one of the largest celestial sights - M31, or the Great Andromeda Galaxy. I found this galaxy by identifying the Great Square, then star hopping two stars left to Mirach then aiming my telescope to the right of the second star up from there.

What I saw was a very big fuzzy light that seemed to have some shine to the edges of my view. The centre of the galaxy was very similar to M13 The Great Globular Cluster in Hercules but much brighter with the wider disc of faint light visible, although this was very hard to see given the amount of light pollution I was getting that night. I was also able to see M32, one of the two partner galaxies to M31 which I could see as a fuzzy star. I could not locate M110 which is the other partner.

M31 by NASA

M31 is very similar to our own Milky Way although it is much bigger. With its partner galaxies, it makes up the local group of galaxies with the Milky Way. It is approximately 3 million light years away with an estimated 300 billion stars. The thought of seeing an object that far away and that far back in time is quite mind boggling. Given I have trouble finding objects just a  few hundred light years away it shows how big a galaxy is!

61 Cygni, A Double Star

As I have mentioned before, I really enjoy looking at double stars so I tried one in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan). I found it by seeing it as the fourth corner of a square made by the stars Deneb, Sadr and Glenah, all part of the Swan's tail and right wing. I saw 61 Cygni as two distinctly orange stars nicely separated.

This double star is one of the closest to us at just 11.4 light years away.

M57 - The Ring Nebula

Although it is getting later in the year and the sights I could see just a month ago are often already behind the house to the east when it gets dark, I noticed Lyra was still just within sight so I thought I would give finding the Ring Nebula a go. Last time I just could not find this but now I have Starmap Pro I thought I would try. This time was much more successful. It is situated pretty much midway between the bottom two stars of the Lyra constellation but very easy to miss if you haven't seen it before.

M57 The Ring Nebula is very small in my telescope and I would not have known what it was if I hadn't been able to use my iPhone app to find it. Initially is looks like a blurry star. Only after a long time looking at it and using averted vision did I start to see the famous "smoke ring" feature coming out. It was still very small and very faint.

A nebula is the gas emissions coming from a dying star. This particular nebula is some 1,000-5,000 light years away. Scientists have estimated that the gas cloud was formed about 20,000 years ago and is expanding at 12 miles per second.

Image courtesy of NASA