Messier 94 is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed


Objects: M94

M94 (mag 8.2), a spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 4 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 Cambridge , it is visible all night. It will become visible at around 20:23 (EST), 44° above your eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. It will then reach its highest point in the sky at 00:39, 88° above your southern horizon. It will be lost to dawn twilight at around 05:09, 40° above your western horizon.

At a declination of 41°07'N, it is easiest to see from the northern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much south of 28°S.

At magnitude 8.2, M94 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 M94 is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
M94 12h50m50s 41°07'N Canes Venatici 8.2 0'00"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 5 Apr 2020

The sky on 5 April 2020
Sunrise
06:17
Sunset
19:14
Twilight ends
20:53
Twilight begins
04:39


Waxing Gibbous

91%

12 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:36 11:18 17:01
Venus 07:59 15:40 23:20
Moon 16:19 23:09 05:46
Mars 03:28 08:12 12:57
Jupiter 02:53 07:33 12:14
Saturn 03:13 07:58 12:44
All times shown in EDT.

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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