Galaxy in Virgo
M59
Koehler found this and M60 on the same night in April 1779, while he and Messier were both busy watching a comet go past. Messier reached them four days later and picked up M58 on the way, which Koehler had missed. M59's core turns in the opposite direction to the rest of it, which usually means it has swallowed something.
Counter-rotating cores are a fingerprint of a merger: two galaxies met, one nucleus survived, and the material it acquired came in spinning the wrong way and never sorted itself out. About two hundred billion solar masses in all, and a black hole of a couple of hundred million at the middle.
- Catalogue
- M59
- Type
- Galaxy
- Constellation
- Virgo
- Distance
- 60 million light-years
- Apparent magnitude
- 9.6
- Surface brightness
- 21.2 mag/□″
- Apparent size
- 5′ × 3′
- Right ascension
- 12h 42m
- Declination
- +11.65°
- Found by
- Johann Gottfried Koehler, 1779
Small enough that its 9.6 magnitudes arrive concentrated rather than smeared: 21.2 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 5.
| 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 | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 7 18.6 mag/□″ | No | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 8 18.1 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
| Bortle 9 17.8 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
At the eyepiece
A modest bright oval, best found as one of a trio with M58 and M60 — all three fit in a low-power field, which is the pleasant thing about this part of Virgo. Individually there is little to see; collectively you are looking across sixty million light-years at a crowd.
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 M59 itself, not from the middle of Virgo.
- M60 Galaxy 26′ apart Virgo · magnitude 8.8 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M58 Galaxy 1.1° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.7 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
- M89 Galaxy 1.8° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.8 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
- M90 Galaxy 2.0° apart Virgo · magnitude 9.5 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
One of 110. Positions J2000; the sky is the final authority.