The Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is a spiral galaxy and is the closest neighbor to our Milky Way galaxy at a distance of about 2-1/2 million light years. It’s 220,000 light years across and contains about 1 trillion stars. It’s actually moving towards the Milky Way at about 70 miles per second and will collide and… Read More »
M13 is a globular cluster, consisting of about 300,000 stars, in the constellation Hercules. It’s about 25,100 light years away and 145 light years in diameter. Globular clusters are large collections of stars that are bound together by their gravity. In 1974 radio signals (the Arecibo Message) were beamed towards M31 in part as a… Read More »
One of my favorite Hubble photos is the Pillars of Creation, which shows three large columns of dust and gas which is in the process of creating new stars. These lie in the heart of M16, the Eagle Nebula, which is a fairly bright emission nebula in the constellation Serpens. Last Sunday night the skies were… Read More »
By some lucky coincidence, the skies have been clear for two nights in a row since my new telescope arrived. As it got to dusk I set up my mount, scope and laptop on the deck knowing I’d be able to see Polaris and Bode’s galaxy from there. Seeing as this was my first time… Read More »
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,… Read More »