Galaxy in Pisces
Phantom Galaxy (M74)
Widely considered the hardest object in the catalogue. It is a perfectly formed face-on spiral, which means its light is spread across a large area and its surface brightness is dismal — anything short of a dark sky and it simply is not there.
It has produced three supernovae since 2002, which for a galaxy this hard to see at all is a curious record, and one of them was caught on amateur images taken before anybody knew to look. About a hundred billion stars, two clean arms, and a surface brightness that puts most of it below what a suburban sky will give up.
- Catalogue
- M74
- Type
- Galaxy
- Constellation
- Pisces
- Distance
- 32 million light-years
- Apparent magnitude
- 9.4
- Surface brightness
- 22.9 mag/□″
- Apparent size
- 10′ × 9′
- Right ascension
- 1h 37m
- Declination
- +15.78°
- Found by
- Pierre Méchain, 1780
Small enough that its 9.4 magnitudes arrive concentrated rather than smeared: 22.9 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 3.
| 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 | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 5 20.3 mag/□″ | No | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge | Challenge |
| Bortle 6 19.3 mag/□″ | No | No | No | No | No |
| 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
The hardest thing in the catalogue and the standard by which people measure a sky. Under excellent conditions with 250mm the arms are faintly traceable; under ordinary suburban conditions nothing whatever is there, whatever the aperture. If you cannot find it, the sky is usually the reason.
When, and from where
Highest in the middle of the night in October. Passes overhead at 16°N and rises from everywhere except the far south — below 74°S it never clears the horizon.
| Latitude | Highest it gets | |
|---|---|---|
| 60°N Oslo, Anchorage | 46° | |
| 51°N London, Calgary | 55° | |
| 40°N New York, Madrid | 66° | |
| 30°N Cairo, Houston | 76° | |
| 0°N the equator | 74° | |
| 33°S Sydney, Cape Town | 41° |
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 M74 itself, not from the middle of Pisces.
- M33 Triangulum Galaxy 15° apart Triangulum · magnitude 5.7 · binoculars from Bortle 3 or darker
- M77 Cetus A 23° apart Cetus · magnitude 8.9 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M32 Galaxy 28° apart Andromeda · magnitude 8.1 · binoculars from Bortle 5 or darker
- M31 Andromeda Galaxy 28° apart Andromeda · magnitude 3.4 · binoculars from Bortle 4 or darker
One of 110. Positions J2000; the sky is the final authority.