Tonight started out frustrating but was very rewarding. I went out at 9:15pm with poor seeing and good transparency. I started looking for M51, nearly at zenith with Ursa Major high in the North/West sky. My iPod Touch 4G running Sky Safari Plus kept crashing. I struggled to find M51 because the position at zenith had me confused. After about 15 minutes of looking I finally found it and breathed a sigh of relief. It was looking better than usual which gave me hope for finding some more galaxies. I went on to find M106 with a little difficulty. It was had a nice bright “mottled” looking nucleus. Then I headed over to Virgo! I was a little freaked out at first, I thought it was going to be difficult to distinguish each galaxy. I quickly star hopped to the general area and began observing. I started from a magnitude 5 star and moved down a degree or so. I could barely make out M98, a face-on spiral galaxy, with averted vision. It was at least 3-4 times as long as it was wide. I then went to M99, another very faint spiral galaxy East of the 5th magnitude star. North to M100 next, another spiral galaxy. Then things started to get confusing. I went East a few degrees to Markarian’s Chain. I’m pretty sure I saw M84 and M86. They were about equal brightness but M86 was a little more elongated. Then I moved a tiny bit East and saw M87, a Giant Elliptical galaxy. It was a tad brighter than M84 and M86. There are so many galaxies in this area that I’m not 100% sure I saw the right ones. I still have some more Messier’s to go in Virgo, so hopefully I can track them down in the next month or two. Tonight was a great night despite some frustration. I also saw a short meteor in the East as an added bonus! I got 7 more Messier’s, all galaxies, bringing me up to 46/110. I’m slowly but surely adding more to my list!
Markarian's Chain
