salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller welcome to eyes on the sky
what's up this week we have a crescent moon that is waxing so it is getting
larger over in the western sky that will then impinge into the southern and
overhead sky so we're gonna spin way over to the north and look at Ursa Major
actually a little bit more towards the Northeast and kind of overhead away from
the moon so we'll have the moon behind us while we're looking in this area of
the sky there's the seven bright stars of the big
dipper or plow as my viewers over in the UK might also call this shape this
particular star Megrez is at the point between where the handle and the bowl of
what the dipper shape would be is and that star is a type A spectral class
star so it's a very white star and it's gonna be pretty easy for you to see if
we Center that we can zoom in on that area and see what we have happening in
this part of the sky now I know that it's kind of cold and people don't want
to spend too much time outside while it is cold to observe but this one is a
neat area to look at so you can start actually with some binoculars if you
don't want to spend too much time out there and look for Megrez and then
you'll see these stars in that particular area now there's not a whole
lot of variety of these brighter stars kind of hanging around around here we
have a an m-class star which should offer a nice contrast with Megrez cause
Megrez is white and an m-class star is a red star so you should see at least a
deep orange color then we've also got another m-class star so definitely look
at those this particular star is a K class are so kind of close to that M
look and see if you've got a little bit of a color contrast or not now notice
5.5, 5.8, 5.7 - these are all very similar
in brightness so you should be able to see any differences fairly easily Megrez
is a little bit brighter at 3.3 as we go over here we
have another A class star like Megrez to get offer a nice contrast but it is
5.4 so you can kind of compare these three stars with this one and look
at those color differences and then this star right out here we've got a G class
star G class is like our Sun this star is larger than our Sun is but it should be
about the same color so that would be an interesting contrast to look at the A
class and the G class star there and see if you see the subtle color differences
because again pretty close in brightness 6.05 and 5.35
this will be a little bit brighter but you might be able to see that but
what we're actually looking for is now I've shown you all the stars that you'd
be looking for in the general area in that shape so you notice that there's
these three stars Megrez over here and then these two stars here we're gonna go
from Megrez in the direction of where these two stars are at the end of this
line and we're gonna just go past this star to this right here and that is well
it's just a 9.7 magnitude star and that doesn't seem very exciting
and quite honestly it isn't necessarily except for the fact that it also happens
to be a Messier object believe it or not and forty is right there also known as
Winnecke 4 now why is m40 just a star well that's because Messier was looking
for what he thought was a nebulous type object in this particular area that he
thought was supposed to be there based on what Johannes Hevelius had said and so he
was looking and he didn't find it and perhaps his optics were just bad
maybe his eye was just had something in it that night I don't know but he
misidentified this as being something that was nebulous and it's not if we
zoom in we can see we have a double star so we got a 9.7 magnitude
star and we have a 10.1 magnitude star nothing terribly special
about them they're actually pretty easy to resolve because they're nice and far
apart when we measure that distance it's a good 53 I believe it's 53 arc seconds
apart and so that's... simple! to resolve in most any
telescope even at fairly low power you don't need a lot of magnification to do
that but it is a Messier object it's sometimes called Messier's Mistake so
you might be able to see why but try and resolve it with binoculars first if you
can I mean 53 it really I have that 56 but
that really isn't about 53 I believe is the correct distance that those are at
you might be able to do that with binoculars just barely if not just use
low magnification with a telescope and check out this particular area over in
Ursa Major as that particular constellation rises up here in the late
portion of winter as we move in toward spring and this one shouldn't be too
difficult to see I think for most of us the most difficult aspect of this might
be just the fact that they are nearly 10th magnitude stars so hopefully you'll
be able to pick those out among whatever your light pollution conditions happen
to be where you are at and 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