A Galactic Treasure Trove

In the eastern sky between the Big Dipper, Coma Berenices and Virgo lies one of the richest regions of galaxies visible to backyard telescopes. It’s called the Realm of the Galaxies and it’s definitely worth an entry into your bucket list of celestial sights.

Some spring night when the moon isn’t up and you’re far from city lights, scan a small telescope slowly through this region and you’ll be stunned by the sight. Even an instrument of only four or six inches in diameter will reveal tiny fuzzy patches of light among the pinpoint stars: dozens of individual galaxies whose light left their sources ages ago when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth.

Toward the constellation of Virgo, for example, lies the famous Virgo Cluster of galaxies, a system of several thousand stellar systems bound together by gravitation and located some 60 or 70 million light years from our own Milky Way. Though we see only the brightest as tiny smudges of light, most are massive spiral and elliptical galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of suns and planetary systems.

Farther to the north, in the region of Coma Berenices, Berenice’s Hair, we find the more distant Coma cluster. Lying some 400 million light years away, this cluster is home to a thousand galaxies that astronomers have discovered are embedded in a region of hot gas. We know today that, as the galaxies move through this material, they seem to become stripped of their gas and dust, the raw materials out of which new stars and planetary systems are born.

On the next clear, dark night, take a small telescope out for a spin through the cosmos. In just one short evening