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| The Big Dipper (Not my pic) |
This post covers a night of scoping with my friend Jason at Hueston Woods the evening of 3/26/2016. This objects of interest are as follows:
Messier #97 - The Owl Nebula
Messier #51a - The Whirlpool Galaxy
Messier #108 - The Surfboard Galaxy
The Big Dipper is not a constellation, rather something called an asterism, which is a prominent pattern or group of stars, typically having a popular name but smaller than a constellation. In this case the Big Dipper makes up the larger constellation known as Ursa Major, or the Great Bear. Ursa Major is a circumpolar constellation, meaning it rotates closely around Polaris (the North Star) and therefore is always visible in the sky all year long.
The goal was to see how many objects were visible using my 8" Newtonian reflector. All 3 objects listed above were pretty faint on a night with a pretty clear sky. They appear as faint, colorless 'ghosts' which is no surprise since all 3 have a surface brightness of 13 or fainter. A bonus object was seen in the same FOV as the Whirlpool Galaxy, an NGC object.
I plan to get pictures next time I'm out.
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