Messier 83 is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed


Objects: M83

The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy M83 (NGC 5236; mag 7.2), a face-on spiral galaxy in Hydra will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 16 April it will reach its highest point in the sky at around midnight local time, and on subsequent evenings it will culminate four minutes earlier each day.

From Los Angeles , it is visible between 23:13 and 02:29. It will become accessible at around 23:13, when it rises to an altitude of 21° above your south-eastern horizon. It will reach its highest point in the sky at 00:51, 26° above your southern horizon. It will become inaccessible at around 02:29 when it sinks below 21° above your southern horizon.

At a declination of 29°52'S, it is easiest to see from the southern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much north of 40°N.

At magnitude 7.2, M83 is quite faint, and certainly not visible to the naked eye, but can be viewed through a pair of binoculars or small telescope.

The position of M83 is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
M83 13h37m00s 29°52'S Hydra 7.2 0'00"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 16 Apr 2017

The sky on 16 April 2017
Sunrise
06:18
Sunset
19:25
Twilight ends
20:53
Twilight begins
04:50


Waning Gibbous

65%

19 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:26 13:09 19:53
Venus 04:44 10:54 17:03
Moon 23:30 04:48 10:06
Mars 07:48 14:48 21:48
Jupiter 18:30 00:19 06:07
Saturn 00:03 05:02 10:02
All times shown in PDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

Image credit

© Digitised Sky Survey (DSS); Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-II)

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