The Messier objects are a list of 110 deep space objects, including galaxies, nebula and star clusters, that can all be seen with small telescopes, binoculars and many even with the naked eye in reasonably dark skies. The majority of the list was created by Charles Messier in Paris in the late 1700’s.
The largest, Andromeda Galaxy (M31), appears 3° wide x 1° thick in the night sky, making it appear 6x bigger than the Sun or the Moon even though it’s 2.5M light-years away.
The brightest is Pleiades (M45), sometimes known as the Seven Sisters, which is an open star cluster in the constellation of Taurus. You can easily see many of the these stars just by looking up, even in light polluted skies, although even with a small telescope the viewing is amazing.
Because of how the earth tilts and orbits the Sun, the best viewing of the Messier objects is scattered throughout the seasons. There are a few weeks in mid-March to early-April where it’s possible to view all 110 DSOs on the list. Many astronomy organizations, including the Minnesota Astronomical Association (MAS), organize a Messier Marathon where members try to see how many they can observe in one night.
Making it more fun, the challenge is to try and find as many as you can without using any GoTo / automated functions or setting circles on your telescope nor even smart phone apps that tell you where things are in the sky. Instead you pull out your star charts and use your finder-scope mounted on your telescope to look for bright, easily identified stars. Then you star-hop your way to the DSO, rotating your telescope based on comparing your map to what you’re seeing in the finder scope until you find what you’re looking for. Then you can switch to viewing through your telescope’s eyepiece at a higher magnification.
This year they held their marathon on April 8th, a little later than normal but that was the weekend closest to the new moon.
In the few weeks prior to the marathon I was racing to complete the build of my new telescope and it saw its first light the weekend prior. The event was held at the MAS Cherry Grove Observatory located about 60 miles south of the twin cities. It’s reasonably dark although you can see the light dome of the cities to the north and Rochester the the SE.
During the day it was snowing off and on and windy, but the skies were predicted to clear for the evening. The viewing was excellent that night, with really clear skies and an amazing number of stars in sight overhead compared to my suburban sky at home. It was also pretty cold that evening, dropping down to 21°F. They generally advise dressing as if the temperature will be 20° colder than actual so I brought lots of warm layers but at those temps even that only goes so far. Thankfully there’s a warming house at the site plus I also brought a few hand warmers with.
Right at dusk one of the long-time members pointed out Mercury low in the western sky which was a real treat.
As a first timer with a new scope, I wasn’t expecting to find too many of the objects. Right away I found M42 (Orion’s Nebula), M43 (another nebula right next to Orion) and M45 (Pleiades) because I had observed them before and knew right where they were in the sky.
From there I mostly followed the recommended Messier Marathon order. M52 and M103, a couple of open star clusters in the constellation Cassieopia, took a little while trying to figure out what i was looking at. Both were really neat to look at, but seeing as I was trying to see how many objects from the list I could find, I didn’t spend a lot of time ‘observing’ and instead was focused on learning how to find my way in the sky.
More than a few times I thought I was starting my star hop from a specific star and couldn’t figure why i couldn’t find what I was looking for, then eventually realized I was starting at the wrong star. My 9×50 RACI finder-scope gives a 9x magnification, 5° diameter field-of-view (FOV) of the sky however many of the key stars in the constellations are just a little farther apart than that so it can be hard as a newbie to tell exactly which one is in your view. Many times I had to move to the end of my scope and sight along the top to verify just what star I was aimed at.
After a couple of hours I got much better at orienting the charts to the sky and also being able to swing the scope between a couple of reference stars or move a certain direction and angle off my starting point. I found M1 (Crab Nebula) in Taurus, M35 in Gemini and M36, M37 and M38 in Auriga (all open star clusters) pretty quickly and that’s when I felt like I was starting to get the hang of it. The M65 and M66 spiral galaxies together in Leo were a real treat. Jupiter was passing under Leo and I was able to use that as a star hopping reference as well.
Ursa Major was tough as I went inside the warming house around 11:45 or so and by the time I came out it was almost straight above me. Using a dobsonian telescope pointed almost straight up can be really tough because you can’t easily just rotate and angle the scope, especially when your star hops need to cross both sides of vertical.
Instead I swung back to the west and decided I wanted to try working on Virgo which has many observable galaxies that make up the Virgo Supercluster. It took quite a while to find M61 (spiral galaxy), or actually I found it 3-4 times, but kept trying to cross check it to make sure it wasn’t M49 I was seeing.
By this time it was around 1:00 am and I was getting pretty cold and tired so I decided to wrap it up with 26 Messier objects observed, far more than I expected. As I was just getting ready to start packing up I noticed Mars coming up in the SE, on top of seeing Mercury and Jupiter.
My full observing list for the marathon included M1, M35, M36, M37, M38, M41, M42, M43, M44, M45, M46, M47, M48, M50, M52, M61, M65, M66, M67, M81, M82, M93, M97, M103, M108, M109, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars.
For an amateur-made 6″ f/8 dobsonian telescope, it performed very well, exceeding my expectations. Combined with my Meade HD-60 eyepieces, the views were very good and I was amazed at what I was able to see. There’s so much to see in the night sky, far more than I ever imagined. Many of the objects I was seeing were very small and faint, even magnified, and appeared as faint fuzzies. I know there’s viewing techniques to help bring out more detail and, of course, there’s bigger scopes, better locations, better eyepieces, etc. But to actually be able to see so many deep space objects, entirely different galaxies that are hundreds of thousands of light years wide and tens of millions of light years away is beyond amazing.