Thank you for all the great suggestions that were put forward for this months target and for those that participated in last month’s challenge, it was a blast!
For this month's draw we used a online random draw generator to pick the winners.
And our winners are, M101 for the Northern Hemisphere and
M101,
Besides it being included in the now famous Charles
William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse was a keen astronomer and observed and sketched M101 with his 72 inch telescope in 1851. At the time he and his contemporaries still thought these were nebula and were unaware of it being a spiral galaxy, his descriptions match it wonderfully.
For more on the 3rd Earl of Rosse see the wiki link below and also a link to his sketch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_P ... l_of_Rosse
http://www.
The image below is taken from Stellarium and shows the general region in which to find M101.
It is the brightest, largest and most luminous globular cluster in orbit around the Milky Way. It is thought to be the nucleus of a dwarf galaxy that has merged with the Milky Way in the past.
Ptolemy mentioned it in the mid 2nd century AD, Johannes Bayer assigned Greek letters to it’s brightest stars in 1603, he also designated it as Omega Centauri, Edmond Halley listed it in 1677 as a luminous patch, Lacaille added it to his catalogue in 1755 and John Herschel finally correctly identified it as a globular cluster in the 1830’s.
Included below is a link to the wiki page for more information.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Centauri
And another Stellarium image showing the general region and the location of
And that wraps up this month's targets!
Please add the target or targets to your observing or imaging lists and have some fun with them, we look forward to your visual reports, sketches, images or anything else you wish to share.
Thank you and have fun out under the stars wherever you may be!