Galaxy in Virgo
M58
A barred spiral in Virgo, though at sixty million light-years the bar wants a good telescope and a better night. Two supernovae went off in it a year apart, in 1988 and 1989, which is a rough decade for anything living there.
It is one of only four barred spirals Messier catalogued, and it is losing its gas to the Virgo Cluster like everything else in there — star formation has retreated to the bar and the ring around the core, and the outer disc has largely stopped. Sixty million light-years is far enough that the whole thing subtends less than a Moon-sixth.
- Catalogue
- M58
- Type
- Galaxy
- Constellation
- Virgo
- Distance
- 62 million light-years
- Apparent magnitude
- 9.7
- Surface brightness
- 22.0 mag/□″
- Apparent size
- 6′ × 5′
- Right ascension
- 12h 38m
- Declination
- +11.82°
- Found by
- Charles Messier, 1779
Small enough that its 9.7 magnitudes arrive concentrated rather than smeared: 22.0 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 4.
| 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 | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 6 19.3 mag/□″ | No | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 7 18.6 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
| Bortle 8 18.1 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
| Bortle 9 17.8 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
At the eyepiece
A small oval with a brighter middle, and the bar is a 250mm proposition on a dark night rather than something you will glimpse. Its usefulness is as a landmark: it sits at one end of the run of Virgo galaxies and gives you a bearing in a region where it is easy to lose track of which smudge is which.
When, and from where
Highest in the middle of the night in March. Passes overhead at 12°N and rises from everywhere except the far south — below 78°S it never clears the horizon.
| Latitude | Highest it gets | |
|---|---|---|
| 60°N Oslo, Anchorage | 42° | |
| 51°N London, Calgary | 51° | |
| 40°N New York, Madrid | 62° | |
| 30°N Cairo, Houston | 72° | |
| 0°N the equator | 78° | |
| 33°S Sydney, Cape Town | 45° |
Nearby in the sky
The whole catalogue →This is a busy patch. 4 more of the catalogue sit within five degrees, which is a binocular field or two — worth planning a session around rather than visiting once. Everything below is measured from M58 itself, not from the middle of Virgo.
- M89 Galaxy 53′ apart Virgo · magnitude 9.8 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
- M59 Galaxy 1.1° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.6 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M90 Galaxy 1.4° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.5 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
- M60 Galaxy 1.5° apart Virgo · magnitude 8.8 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
One of 110. Positions J2000; the sky is the final authority.