Spring's Realm of Galaxies

Small section of the Virgo Cluster

My blog last week was about Saturn and how big and beautiful it is. I'm going to pitch you again this week on a second reason to get outside and observe. April and May are the best months to observe galaxies. Matter of fact the largest collection of galaxies in the sky is just above Saturn. It's called "The Realm of Galaxies".

The Realm contains LOTS of galaxies. Nowhere else in the sky is the concentration even remotely as high. On the boundary between Virgo [the Girl] and Coma Berenices [Berenice's Hair] is the enormous Virgo Cluster. The Virgo Cluster is 60 million [give or take 10 million] light-years away. The Local Group (including our Milky Way) has fewer than forty galaxies. The Virgo Cluster has more than a thousand (the Realm is the heart of the cluster). A typical Virgo galaxy is the size of our own Milky Way. Since the Milky Way contains about 200 - 400 billion stars, the Virgo Cluster must hold trillions of stars. You can't really see these galaxies with binoculars and they're very faint with a small telescope. What you need is "big glass" like a large telescope at an observatory.

Observatories all over the US are now opening for the 2011 year. Saturn continues to get fainter and smaller each week as the Earth moves away from it. Don't get me wrong, Saturn is still big and beautiful, but the longer you wait the less you will see of it.

If you live in Kansas, here are the closest observatories and their viewing schedules.

Kansas City - http://www.askc.org/Documents/2011%20Powell%20Observatory%20schedule.pdf

Topeka - http://www.washburn.edu/cas/physics/openhouse.html

Eskridge - http://www.nekaal.org/doku.php?id=schedule

Wichita - http://webs.wichita.edu/lapo/events.html

Next blog - next week