A Different Kind of Galaxy Challenge

Apollo XX · Unread post by **Apollo XX** » Sat Apr 01, 2023 10:43 am

Greetings Fellow Observers,

I present to you all today - meaning both our visual observers as well as our imagers - a significant challenge for your consideration during the April dark skies period. Spring is considered 'galaxy season' in the astronomy realm, and many of us are already reaping the rewards of this special timeframe. While mostly we seek galaxies of significant substance, albeit many of our targets can be quite dim, you don't often hear about us pining on about the dwarf galaxy population. That's because they're typically very difficult to observe, and even image for that matter.

Well, it's been said that enduring difficulties can help us to better appreciate the less troublesome times in our lives so I'm bringing to you an opportunity to engage in something difficult, just for the sake of it. Whether it makes any other part of the hobby seem easier afterward I cannot say, but sometimes it's fun to push ourselves just for the, well, fun of it.

Leo I is a dwarf galaxy in the constellation, you guessed it, Leo, and is currently thought to be the most distant satellite of our own Milky Way. It is so challenging to observe visually that it didn't happen until the year 1990. The galaxy itself was discovered in a study of photographic plates back in 1950.

What makes Leo I so challenging is that it lies less than an apparent 15' (fifteen arc-minutes, 1/4°) from the alpha star in Leo. That star's formal name is Regulus, and this beacon, shining at magnitude 1.4, has a tendency to brighten a significant area around itself and simply washes out Leo I under all but the best conditions.

: Leo I Dwarf Galaxy Chart.png (37.54 KiB) Viewed 47081 times

So my friends, my challenge to you all is this; for the visual peeps, find a dark sky sometime around the new moon in April and see if you can conquer this beast, and for the imagers, bring us home the goods. I can't claim any significant competence in the astrophotography realm, but I do wonder if this target would be a good candidate for that newfangled gazillion-short-exposures-at-high-gain method? You guys will have to tell me.

I wish you all the best of luck with this challenge, and I look forward to hearing all the tales of both successes and failures. Forgetting to bring your best eyepiece which surely would have done the job, having to endure the frights of things that go bump in the night, kicking the tripod after having carefully aligned everything, ripping the power cord out of the camera because it got stuck in the zipper of your coat, breathing on the eyepiece at exactly the moment when you were sure you were seeing it...we've all been there. As another old saying goes, misery loves company, so don't be shy. Tell us all about it!

Keep Looking Up!

Mike McCabe