Dark cold nights of November make for good hunting for the fainter constellations of fall.
Pegasus flies high in the southeast after nightfall and is a good guideposts for some of autumns dimmer patterns.
Look south and east of the Great Square of Pegasus for Pisces, the fish. In Greek legend the two fish tied together with a rope, represent Aphrodite and Eros who transformed themselves to escape a monster.
The sprawling star pattern includes the circlet marking the western fish.
Located below the pattern of the Eastern fish is the spiral galaxy M74.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has rendered it in exquisite detail. M74 is known as a grand design spiral and has two prominent blueish spiral arms wound neatly around the redder galactic nucleus.
The nucleus appears redder because there is little new star formation there and many of the hot blue stars have evolved to become red giant stars or have exhausted their fuel altogether.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope provides a dramatic view of the infrared light of the galaxy.
The pink hues depict dust lanes that punctuate the spiral arms showing dense cloud regions where new stars can form.
To the east of the Great Square and Pisces, lies the small pattern of Aries the Ram. The third brightest star in the pattern named Pisces is a lovely pair of white stars easy to distinguish in a small telescope.
Above Aries is the constellation of Triangulum. The constellation contains the third largest galaxy of our local group after the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies M33 the Triangulum galaxy.
This galaxy is relatively large and diffuse from our perspective and can be spotted with binoculars.
NASA’s Space Telescope’s have imaged M33’s spiral features in great detail. Spitzer’s infrared view shows the distribution of dust in its ragged spiral arms. An ultraviolet image from NASA’s GALEX mission shows emissions from hot stars in its disk.
Look for the bright blue and white areas to see where star formation has been extremely active over the past few million years.
Patches of yellow and gold are regions where star formation was more active 100 million years ago.
Brave chilly nights to enjoy the constellations stars and galaxies of the November sky.
Celestial wonders await you in Tonight’s Sky.
Leave a Reply