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

Messier 101 is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed

Objects: M101
Please wait
Loading 0/4
Click and drag to rotate
Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
Touch with mouse to dismiss
The sky at

The Pinwheel Galaxy M101 (NGC 5457; mag 7.9) in Ursa Major will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 22 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 Fairfield , it is visible all night. It will become visible at around 20:52 (EST), 49° above your north-eastern horizon, as dusk fades to darkness. It will be lost to dawn twilight at around 04:48, 49° above your north-western horizon.

At a declination of 54°20'N, it is easiest to see from the northern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much south of 15°S.

Begin typing the name of a town near to you, and then select the town from the list of options which appear below.

At magnitude 7.9, M101 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 M101 is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
M101 14h03m10s 54°20'N Ursa Major 7.9 23'59"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 23 Apr 2024

The sky on 23 April 2024
Sunrise
05:59
Sunset
19:41
Twilight ends
21:24
Twilight begins
04:16

15-day old moon
Waxing Gibbous

99%

15 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 05:21 11:43 18:05
Venus 05:40 12:09 18:38
Moon 18:40 00:13 05:38
Mars 04:34 10:25 16:16
Jupiter 06:56 14:03 21:10
Saturn 04:16 09:54 15:31
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)

Share

Fairfield

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

41.14°N
73.26°W
EST

Color scheme