salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller welcome to eyes on the sky
what's up this week we have the moon out of the way for a little while it is
going towards third phase and will be new so we've got about 10 to 14 days
where we can start looking for some really deep sky objects things that are
dim faint and not always easy to see and even if you have a larger telescope
you'll still want to use things like averted vision so what should we look
for well this particular object I thought would be a fun one to kind of
challenge us and to look for carefully you might need to go to a dark sky site
bundle up because I know it's cold for all of us here in the northern
hemisphere but this would be a good one for us to try for because it is in Orion
and it's not hard to find at least from where the location is because we've got
the belt stars right here you can start right here at Alnitak and if you use
sigma Orionis you can just create a line right through there and find this object
so what is this well there's actually multiple things here the brightest one
that we would normally know about is m78 which was one of Messier finds actually
Pierre Mechain found it so m78 is this particular region of this you can see
that in the size of that it is eight arc minutes by six arc minutes so not small
but not too large either so you can use a little bit more magnification for it so
there's eight minutes across there's about six minutes right there so
approximately this area right in here is really what we call m78
or NGC 2068 now like I said there's more things actually happening
in here so what else is there well there's also NGC 2067 which is this
little region up here I found that one a little hard to see there is also
NGC 2064 which is this area just west of there so I mean really
those are gonna be difficult to distinguish if you're seeing
NGC 2064 and NGC 2068 together that's totally okay the other
one that is definitely easier to tell that is different is NGC 2071
if I could actually type it in correctly is this one and the reason why I like to
start here is because there's two 10th magnitude stars right next to each other
and two of these are actually a double star so I find these easiest to kind of
try to look for first but you'll notice that they're kind of not really near any
other bright stars so we can estimate where it is now fortunately this is not
too difficult to find even when the finder scopes so let's bring up a
finderscope starting at Alnitak so we'll bring up a finder here this is a correct
image view so this is not reversed left to right or up and down this is what
binoculars would show so here you can see the three belt stars like this this
is Sigma Orionis right here below Alnitak and we're gonna go in that
direction you can see actually where m78 is right there so if we head in that
direction we notice that we're gonna find like a 7th magnitude star over here
so we know that we're going the right way what you can also see is usually
these three stars right here they kind of form what would almost be a square
shape you go oh you could fill in the square maybe see where that's at that's
pretty close to where we want to go right there so if we hit that it
actually it's a dark nebula when you try to do this on stellarium but
that is approximately where m78 is going to be at you can see when i type that in
m78 we're pretty much right there so you can use these three stars to kind
of help you finish that square off just a little bit just go little outside of
there and on this line and you should be able to find that fairly easily now when
you zoom in this particular star might be in your field of view and I found
these ones easiest to see I actually also found this particular part of the
nebula the brightest I had difficulty seeing this this was a fainter this
a little bit more nebulosity I will grant you I did not spend too much time
recently looking at this because I only had a short window to go and look at
things but I wanted to give you also an idea of kind of what you might expect to
see first so the first thing that you're likely to see is probably the first
thing that I was able to see just without even really dark adapting and
not taking too much time so this one right here
but do start to look again away from and back towards Alnitak to see if you can
find where the m78 nebula is now I do want to point out and I'm gonna search
for something that it may seem a little odd but this is an actual star so we're
using the Henry Draper catalog so HD and it is 3-8-5-6-3 so it's
the star right here now if I take off the nebula button you'll be able to see
where that's at and we're in relation to it it's a tenth magnitude star but that
is the star that illuminates this whole thing because this is a reflection
nebula unlike the Orion Nebula below Orion's belt which is emission and has
excited gases that actually glow on their own this particular nebula is
reflection so it's just reflecting light from this particular star and so
everything that you see is that light bouncing off of that nebula and then
coming back to us it's not too much further away than the Orion Nebula the
Orion Nebula is about 1300 light years this one's about 1600 light years but
because it's reflection I'm gonna guess and say that yeah that's why it's a
little bit more difficult to see if we're just kind of relying on a couple
stars however there are also stars forming in here so very much like the
Orion Nebula where there's star forming regions in there at stars actively
forming there's also stars actively forming in here this is part of a larger
group of stars called the Orion OB moving group I believe is what they call
all of these stars that are in this general region of the sky because we're
looking towards the Orion Arm of our particular galaxy so this is a very
active part of our galaxy away from us opposite the center of the Milky Way
looking towards the outer edges but it's a very
cool area to definitely take a look for and see if you can find this with a
telescope obviously the larger the aperture the darker the skies that
you're able to be under the more you are likely to see but give it time let your
eyes fully dark adapt as much as possible block any extraneous light that
you have may have around you do bundle up if you're cold being warm is gonna
help you because if you are cold then your blood vessels start to constrict
and then you don't see quite as much as well so I definitely dress for about 10
20 degrees warmer than you think you might need to because just sitting there
can be cold so do that and then look for Messier 78 and all these other NGC
objects out here in this part of the Orion constellation that's all for this
week keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down so we can all
see what's up I'm David fuller wishing you clear and dark skies