Messier 99 is a grand design spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices. Unlike our Milky Way, it does not have a bar structure across the center. It is about 45 million light years away and is part of the large Virgo Cluster of galaxies Its apparent size is fairly small, only around 5 arc minutes in…
Author: Linda
Antennae Galaxies
The Antennae Galaxies (NGC 4038 & 4039) are merging galaxies in Corvus. This is one of the places in the universe where you can see the steps in the gravitational dance all celestial bodies are performing. Granted we can only see this one step and it’s not likely we’ll see any visible change in our…
Needle Galaxy
The Needle Galaxy (NGC 4565) is an edge-on spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices. According to Wikipedia it is 30 to 50 million light years away The smaller galaxy to the upper left might be a satellite galaxy or just a more distant background galaxy. It isn’t obvious from the image and the reference material I…
Aurora In Virginia on 23/24 April 2023
On the night of April 23rd, the northern hemisphere experienced an aurora that reached all the way down to at least Virginia. That doesn’t happen very often. I’ve been lucky enough to see them twice before (sadly it was cloudy for the one that happened just a couple of weeks ago). In both of those…
Messier 37
It’s hard to believe that this is the first image from the California telescope in four months. The weather there has been so bad that the team was beginning to wonder if we would ever get to image in 2023. However, we finally got a couple of good nights though they were, of course, near…
Messier 53
It’s been said that if you have seen one globular cluster you have seen them all. There’s a bit of truth to that. Some are denser and some are sparser but they generally look pretty much like this. This particular cluster, M53, is about 58,000 light years away from us in the constellation Coma Berenices….
Whale and HockeyStick Galaxies
The Whale Galaxy (top right) is a barred spiral galaxy seen edge on. It has a catalog number of NGC 4631. Just above it is the dwarf elliptical galaxy NGC 4627. They are about 30 million light years away. The Hockey Stick Galaxy also known as the Crowbar Galaxy has two NGC numbers, 4656 and…
Linda's Astronomy Adventures 