Salutations celestial sight seers I'm David fuller welcome to eyes on the sky. What's up this week? Well, what was happening around?
42,000 years ago well for starters
we have evidence that there were some pretty advanced deep-sea fishing happening over in East Timor as there were
boats that were making the crossing all the way over to Australia and
evidence of deep-sea fishing for things like tuna and you wonder why is that important to astronomy and that's because
the object we're going to look for has light that has traveled for forty two thousand years so back when
Early humans were making those particular
advances
The light from this object left and is reaching our eyes now. That's how long this has taken
so what we're gonna do is look below Orion, and if you've been following my Twitter or
Facebook feeds you'll have noticed that I have focused a little bit on the constellation of Lepus the Hare and it is right below
Orion right here you can see how there's the the hare shapes kind of got the
Ears going up this way and the tail out that way
So that's supposed to be the hare
If you look at the constellation art, you can see a little bit better representation of how that might
Appear if you're supposed to be looking at in the sky and those stars aren't too terribly dim
There's actually some second & third magnitude stars there
We just tend to overlook it because Orion has so many bright stars and it's such a great shape of a constellation
but if we look just below where Rigel and
Saiph are at the bottom part of the constellation we can find the rabbit here
Now to find this particular object, we're gonna look for to the brightest stars in the rabbit
So here's safe right up there and we're gonna look kinda below there and look for this star Arneb which is a two
Just below a second magnitude
It's a very high third magnitude star at two point five five and then below that not too many degrees away
Is Nihal, Beta Leporis which is a two point eight magnitude star. So these are gonna be similar in brightness
they're only a third of a magnitude difference and as you can see from
The distance here. They're only about three degrees apart
so they will be less than
Your fingers held at arm's length in the Boy Scout salute like this because that would be five degrees
So three degrees is definitely less than that this distance here from safe down to Arneb. That's about
Not quite ten degrees. So fist held at arm's length distance away
Just so you have some idea of how far away you want to be looking for that so to find the object we're looking for
We're gonna just follow a line from Arneb through Nihal like this and then keep going down to this star right here
Which is a fifth magnitude star so seven degrees is our total distance from Arneb to that star
so that's really a
Finderscope field of view and we'll look at that how that would look in a finderscope field here in just a moment
And the object we're looking for is Messier 79 a globular cluster
That you want to try to look for when everything is on the Meridian the Meridian is that line that goes from South?
All the way to North overhead and we'll show you where that's at if you leave in the markings
Right there, that's the Meridian and as you can see we've got
Orion and
The hare Lepus pretty close to that
so three to four hours after sunset at this time of year is a good time to look you can
Really look on either side of it between three and four hours and you'll have a pretty good opportunity to be able to find
m79 so when we zoom in on the area
We're gonna Center those and then we'll bring up what a binoculars field of view would be
That's what binoculars would show here's Arneb way up here. There's Nihal so you'll have both of those
easily within your field of view
You can just kind of aim that general direction get both those then center Nihal and then just take that line and just keep bringing
It down
In this direction and you can see how that 5th magnitude star will show up in your field of view
You want to kind of Center that one and you're going to go back just a little bit because m79 is right over here
there's a ninth magnitude star there and there's another enough ninth magnitude star there and
M79 is right in between there
I actually have to pull up the search window to make it pop up, but that's exactly where it's at and that distance is
Just a degree way
So actually less than a half degree
1/2 degree from that star so you can
probably even have an in the field of view if you kind of Center it but you want to have that star just outside of
Your crosshairs is probably gonna be your best opportunity and then use wide long focal lengths
To start and then you can start bumping that up and when we do bump that up, what do we see?
But a nice bright field of view
Here's your 9th magnitude stars. Let me take the
Measuring tool out of way. There's your one ninth magnitude star on this side
There's your other one on this side this one. It's just a bit brighter. It's an eight point eight magnitude
This one is a nine point four. So they're about 1/2 of a magnitude apart from each other, but
the
globular cluster itself
42,000 light years away so long way off and that lights traveled a long way to get to your eye. It's also
Although it's 8.5 magnitude, which might seem kind of bright look at the surface brightness
It's 13.2. So it's gonna look a little bit dim employ some of those good
deep sky
type of techniques like
Covering your eyes put a towel over your head a dark towel ideally to help block any extraneous light you can use an eyepatch
There like three four five bucks at a drugstore
You can cover one eye and then when you're ready to actually use that put the eye patch on the eye that you're gonna use
to actually look for
M79 and then when you're ready to look at it after about 20-30 minutes of having that on your eye will really dark adapted
And so that's a great opportunity to be able to see more of the stars that are coming from that light
Forty-two thousand light-years wait, but that's how you find
Messier 79 in Lepus the hare not too difficult for those of you well
to the north
you might have some difficulty just because the
height of that off the
horizon is not terribly high as
We can see azmuth wise that's up at 25 degrees. So if you're
Another, I mean - this - I'm looking at this from about 40 degrees north latitude
So if you're 55, that's only gonna be 10 degrees off your horizon. You'd be looking through a lot more atmosphere
You'll need some darker skies, and you really want to look at when it's right there
Within a few degrees of the meridian, so it's at its highest point, but that's how you can find
Messier 79 in the night sky
For this particular time of the year, 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