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

Messier 81 is well placed

Dominic Ford, Editor
From the Deep Sky feed

Objects: M81
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The sky at

Bode's Galaxy M81 (NGC 3031; mag 6.9) in Ursa Major will be well placed in the evening sky in coming weeks. On 19 February 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 because it is circumpolar. It will be highest in the sky at 23:38, 63° above your northern horizon. At dusk, it will become visible at around 18:28 (EST), 43° above your north-eastern horizon. It will be lost to dawn twilight at around 05:26, 40° above your north-western horizon.

At a declination of 69°03'N, it is easiest to see from the northern hemisphere but cannot be seen from latitudes much south of 0°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 6.9, M81 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 M81 is as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
M81 09h55m30s 69°03'N Ursa Major 6.9 0'00"

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0.

The sky on 19 Feb 2025

The sky on 19 February 2025
Sunrise
06:32
Sunset
17:21
Twilight ends
18:55
Twilight begins
04:58

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

50%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 07:01 12:30 17:58
Venus 07:35 14:07 20:40
Moon 23:47 04:35 09:15
Mars 13:07 20:58 04:48
Jupiter 10:54 18:23 01:51
Saturn 07:27 13:08 18:49
All times shown in EST.

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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Cambridge

Latitude:
Longitude:
Timezone:

42.38°N
71.11°W
EST

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