Eyes on the Sky: Find/observe Messier 13 and Messier 92

Salutations celestial sight seers. I'm David Fuller. Welcome to eyes on the sky. What's up this week? Well, we finally have a planet reappearing in the sky before midnight actually high enough up to see and that's Jupiter over in the southeast and you'll notice I'm actually looking at this at 1030 at night. And the reason for that is because astronomical Twilight at least where I am doesn't even begin until 1030 at night. Yes, it gets dark before then but astronomical Twilight when the sun is far enough below the horizon. You actually get dark skies doesn't happen until midnight. And I know that for some of my friends who watch that are further to the north of me that happens even later. So for example, if you're over in London or at that latitude, it doesn't happen until like midnight at this time of year, unfortunately, and that gets even worse until we get past June 21st. But anyway, we can actually see a few dark sky things. And one of the ones I want to point out to you is a globular cluster and this is kind of globular cluster season and I want to show you something on Stellarium that kind of really points that out. So if you look at your solar system, excuse me, your deep sky objects view, you can filter a number of these things by type, but we're going to leave them all up and we're going to click on the labels and markers and I've got Messier and Caldwell and NGC and IC all up. So if we click on the labels and markers, you can see all these different things, but if we bring down the hints, excuse me, we leave the hints and we bring down the labels like this. You can see kind of what is where and where it's at. So all these red things, those are galaxies. So we're kind of getting out of galaxy season, all those things in Virgo and that part of the sky and down here where the Milky Way runs through, you can see there's a lot more objects. So obviously that's where the Milky Way kind of runs. A lot of these are these dotted circles. So those are open clusters and then there's kind of these squares and these other circles that have the little cross on them. Those are all nebula, but in between those, we've got the circles with the cross inside them and those are globular clusters. So this is kind of a nice time to see globular clusters. You can even see them, some of the bright ones with binoculars, although they're better through a telescope because you can add some magnification to them, but this is a nice time for them. As you can see, Jupiter is right near a number of them kind of low in the southeast. That's a little too low. We've got some brighter ones that are higher up. It'll be a little bit easier to find them. So let's bring this down a little bit so we don't go crazy with what we've got here and we're going to turn on our constellation lines and you'll notice that we've got Hercules right here towards the east and Draco kind of winds around near where Ursa Minor is. Ophiuchus is kind of on its side over towards the southeast. We're going to zoom in and we're going to look for Hercules. Now notice Vega is right there. So you're not going to be able to miss Vega. That's a great thing. And between Vega and the fourth brightest star in the entire night sky, Arcturus, is how you find Hercules if you're not sure where to find it. The distance there, just in case you need to measure that, you're going to be going about 15 to 25 degrees so you can kind of go like this for the 15 and like this for the 25 at arm's length. That'll get you in the right neighborhood if you draw that line from Vega towards Arcturus and then you can start looking in that particular region. Now a lot of people call these four stars in Hercules a keystone because they look like a keystone shape and that makes sense. And M13 is right near Eta Hercules, which is not super bright star, three and a half magnitude, but bright enough that most people can see it from most anywhere. It is not the brightest star. As you can see, Zeta is brighter as is Pi over here. But this one is kind of dim, epsilon 3.9. That's the fourth magnitude star. But this one is one that we want to hop off from because M13 is super easy to find. It's literally within a binocular and or finderscope field of view. I mean if we zoom in on that and bam, there's Eta and there is M13. So all you got to do is go right over and you can probably see M13 in that field of view through your finderscope or binoculars because it's really bright. I mean, it's a 5.8 magnitude integrated brightness, but the surface brightness is 11. So that's ridiculously bright. It looks wonderful. Crank up the magnification on that using a telescope because it's a wonderful sight to see now. But if you want to go a little bit fainter or hold off on M13, it's kind of a treat to watch. And we'll look at M92 first. Start from the same star, but see these four stars right here. They make like an arrowhead shape. Really faint arrowhead because these are like eighth and ninth magnitude stars. So they might be a little difficult to see unless you've got a big enough finderscope. I was able to see them through a 70 millimeter set of binoculars without too much trouble, but I know not everybody's binoculars are that big. So if your skies are not dark enough, you may not be able to see this, but that's okay. I'll show you another way to be able to find it. But if you can see it, or if you would just want to start off even using your telescope, use AIDA, follow this particular arrowhead, and just keep going that direction. We go over here, and we keep going this way. Now notice we've got the edge of the arrowhead just out of our field of view where we've got the whole thing pretty much. And look, there is M92 right on the other side. And then we can find it just like that. And if we zoom in, it's even better, but I'll zoom in and see if we can get back the other way. Going back to the keystone, we can go from this star, which is brighter, 3.2 high for Helios, and zoom in on that area. We've got a number of stars that we can use to point. The other good thing is, is that these stars are a little closer to M92. The other one was about a little more than 7 degrees away, but look at this, we're under 6 here, even from Pi, we're at 6.5. So you can almost find that globular cluster in the finderscope or binocular field of view just from these stars. Now, what you can do is kind of remember that this shape, you're going to go from this flat side of it, okay, the flat side of the triangle, because I'm going to take off the constellation line so that they don't confuse you or give you any help, because you're not going to get that help in the sky. Remember this flat triangle of stars, you got 3.2, 4.6, and 4.5, pretty bright stars, you should be able to have no trouble seeing those through a magnified binder. Now, we want to take that and go kind of towards these stars right here, that's a 6 magnitude star, this one right here is a 5.5 magnitude star, that might be the easiest one because it's going to be the brightest one, but any of those you should be able to see, and then this, you follow that line, you're going to have M92 in your field of view, even these ones, you can kind of go that way, you'll still have M92 in your field of view. Now, let's look at what that looks like, we're going to center this one and see here's our stars, we do this, we're going this way, look there's M92 over on the other side, so just keep going, and then you're going to find it. It looks like an out of focus star, it looks like a fuzzy star when you look at it, and then when we zoom in on that particular cluster, you can see a lot more. You may not see quite this, but even at, this is a magnification of 93 times, this cluster will definitely support 100 times magnification without any problem in most any telescope, so definitely push that up to really planetary type magnifications to look at M92, and you can do the same thing with M13 over on the other side of Eta Hercules, and that is all going to be right in this area, boom, like this, of the keystone of Hercules over in the eastern sky, so check that out when you get an opportunity. That's all for this week, keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights, beams down, so we can all see what's up. I'm David Fuller wishing you clear and dark skies.