Something of a shock, being about to get out with a telescope three nights out of five, but given a decent forecast my intention was to go out and find M32 and M110, the two galaxies close to the Andromeda Galaxy. I’ve never been able to find them before despite them looking very obvious in Stellarium.
As luck would have it, that part of the Andromeda constellation was quite close to the zenith and I ended up standing the ST120 tripod on a table to allow the scope to tilt almost vertically whilst allowing me to get close enough to get to the eyepiece. I spent some time looking at the main galaxy itself, trying to spot M32 in its outer reaches before it dawned on me that in such a small scope I might only actually be able to see the main galaxy core and that both M32 and M110 would therefore be much further out than I was looking. Sure enough M32 was then easy to pick out as a small fuzzy blob and star-hopping got me to M110 which was difficult to distinguish from a single star even at fairly high magnification.
Whilst in the area I thought I’d look for the Triangulum Galaxy, about the same distance the other side of the main “spine” of Andromeda; another on my “yet to see” list. Finding it by position alone proved beyond me, so I star-hopped from the bottom star of the Triangulum constellation, Mothallah. There’s a set of stars leading down to a single brighter star labelled in Stellarium as HIP7906 which is just over half way to M33 from Mothallah. On this night at least, this galaxy appeared very small and faint and was barely visible with direct vision.
Moving to the north I found Merak in Ursa Major and then star-hopped down a chain of stars to M108 which was only just discernable as an elongated blur and beyond that M97, the Owl Nebula which was very difficult to make out, but clearly forms one corner of a box with a set of three stars between about 6.5 and 8.5 in magnitude. Averted vision was possibly the easiest way to actually see that anything was present at all.
Final target of the evening was M109. Dropping down to Phad at the bottom of the Plough I star-hopped down to a triangle of 8.5 to 9 magnitude stars surrounding the galaxy, but it was just as hard as M97. Eventually I finally saw it, but only with averted vision.
These six have left me with very few Messier objects left to find in the winter sky (M61, M74, M77, M79 and M104) so I might start returning to some of those I found first now I’m finding it easier to recognise what I’m seeing.