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This was a surprisingly successful night. I was able to bag 4 galaxies from my suburban backyard. In the May issue of Sky & Telescope there is a guide to the Virgo Cluster. They show you how to get a toehold from which to explore the cluster. It worked well for me.
I started at Denebola, the bright star in the tail of Leo the lion. Then, I moved left to the "T" asterism they talked about. From there, I
was able to find M98, M99, M100, and M85.
M98 was the first and most difficult object at magnitude 10.1. It was extremely faint. I almost gave up after staring for about 20 minutes where I knew
it should be. I
printed out a nice chart from Deepsky and had the correct starfield but just couldn't see the galaxy. Finally, using averted vision I was able to catch fleeting glimpses of the galaxy. This was tough.
Magnitude 9.8 M99 was next and was much easier. I was able to view it using averted vision without problem. Before going after the other two galaxies, I
switched from the 22mm Panoptic which gave 42x to the 26mm Plossl yielding 35x. M100 at magnitude 9.4 was found next. Again, I was able to see this using averted vision. The night ended
with a view of M85 at magnitude 9.2. This was the only galaxy tonight that I was able to see using direct vision.
I made sketches of the starfields around each galaxy and compared the sketches to charts to verify that I really did see what I though I saw. This was a
good night.
On the equipment front, I'll be ordering the 10" LX-200 on the 15th. I promise it will really happen this time.
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