Galaxy in Virgo
Sombrero Galaxy (M104)
The Sombrero, six degrees off edge-on, with a dust lane so sharp it looks ruled on. That lane shows in a 150mm, which makes it the best return on modest equipment of any galaxy in the catalogue.
The bulge is enormous for a galaxy this size and holds around two thousand globular clusters, and the black hole at the centre is about a billion solar masses — one of the heaviest in any galaxy nearby. Infrared imaging showed the disc to be a ring rather than a filled plate, which was not what anybody expected.
- Catalogue
- M104
- Type
- Galaxy
- Constellation
- Virgo
- Distance
- 29 million light-years
- Apparent magnitude
- 8.0
- Surface brightness
- 20.5 mag/□″
- Apparent size
- 9′ × 4′
- Right ascension
- 12h 40m
- Declination
- −11.62°
- Found by
- Pierre Méchain, 1781
Small enough that its 8.0 magnitudes arrive concentrated rather than smeared: 20.5 per square arcsecond, which is why it stands out from the sky better than its brightness alone suggests. Why surface brightness is the number that matters.
Could you see it?
Straightforward with 10×50 binoculars from Bortle 6.
| Sky | Eye | 10×50 | 80mm | 130mm | 200mm |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bortle 1 21.9 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 2 21.7 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 3 21.4 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 4 20.9 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 5 20.3 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 6 19.3 mag/□″ | No | Easy | Easy | Easy | Easy |
| Bortle 7 18.6 mag/□″ | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 8 18.1 mag/□″ | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 9 17.8 mag/□″ | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
At the eyepiece
The single best structural detail available to a modest telescope on any galaxy in this catalogue. Give it 150mm under a reasonable sky and the dust lane cuts the bulge cleanly in two. Magnify it — one of the few galaxies that will take 200x and give something back.
When, and from where
Highest in the middle of the night in March. Overhead at 12°S and southerly enough to sit low from northern Europe, though never out of reach there — only north of 78°N does it stop rising at all.
| Latitude | Highest it gets | |
|---|---|---|
| 60°N Oslo, Anchorage | 18° | Low — in the murk |
| 51°N London, Calgary | 27° | |
| 40°N New York, Madrid | 38° | |
| 30°N Cairo, Houston | 48° | |
| 0°N the equator | 78° | |
| 33°S Sydney, Cape Town | 69° |
Nearby in the sky
The whole catalogue →Nothing else in the catalogue is especially close; the nearest is 15° apart, which is a separate trip rather than a nudge of the tube. Everything below is measured from M104 itself, not from the middle of Virgo.
- M68 Globular cluster 15° apart Hydra · magnitude 7.8 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M61 Galaxy 17° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.7 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
- M49 Galaxy 20° apart Virgo · magnitude 8.4 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M83 Southern Pinwheel 23° apart Hydra · magnitude 7.6 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
One of 110. Positions J2000; the sky is the final authority.