Spring means galaxies; they are everywhere. You can start in Ursa Major, drop down through Canes Venatici and Coma Berenices, into Leo and Virgo. Galaxies all over the place. They start to thin out south of there, in the regions of Corvus and Hydra. But really, how many do you need? So get out and get lost amid the island universes. It’s billions of light years of an amazing cosmos, and you don’t need a warp 10 spacecraft to reach it. So enjoy!

Y Canes Venatici  rating: EASY
“La Superba” – extremely red semi-regular variable star
RA 12h 45.1m  Dec +45d 26.6′  (2000)
Magnitude 4.8

Do you like red? As in really really red? As in almost rusty red? Well here’s a star for you. Just step right up and take a look at Y Canes Venatici. Y CVn for short. Y Cvn is one of the reddest of all
the naked-eye stars, with a truly odd and vivid hue in large telescopes.To locate the neighborhood of Y, start at 2nd magnitude Alioth (the Big Dipper handle star closest to the bowl) and imagine a line extending SSW to Cor Caroli (Alpha CVn). Roughly 2/3 of the way down that line, and about 2 degrees west, puts you in the vicinity of Y; it can be found without
too much difficulty due to its color.Y CVn is a giant carbon star:  its atmosphere is filled with large amounts of carbon-containing molecules like C2, C3, CN and SiC. Such compounds absorb much of the star’s blue light, leaving it with an unusually vivid reddish orange color. The beauty of its spectrum earned it the name
“La Superba” from the 19th-century Italian spectroscopy pioneer Pietro Angelo Secchi.The star is also extremely cool, among the coolest known, with a surface temperature of just 2600 Kelvin. And it is variable:  it has a maximum visual brightness of about 4.8 and a visual range of about 1.5 magnitudes in a semi-period averaging 160 days. A longer period of 2100 days may
also be involved.

Truly an observing experience that will leave you seeing red.

Arp 120   rating: MEDIUM
interacting galaxy pair in Virgo
RA 12h 27.7m  Dec +13d 00.5′  (2000)
Magnitude 10.2 (NGC 4438) + 10.8 (NGC 4435)

Arp 120 can be found in the heart of the Virgo cluster, just south of Virgo’s border with Coma Berenices. It consists of two interacting galaxies, NGC 4435 and NGC 4438, together nicknamed “the Eyes.” NGC 4438 features a long tidal tail, probably caused by its interaction with NGC 4435 just 5′ N, and also possibly nearby elliptical giant M86, just 20′ W. If either of the two galaxies were originally a spiral, such structures were disturbed long ago by gravitational encounters.

In a 17-inch scope NGC 4438 is bright, elongated 5-to-2 running SSW to NNE, with a small bright core. It forms striking pair with NGC 4435 5′ NNW. But its core isn’t bright as that of NGC 4435, which in addition to its bright core, also has a stellar nucleus.

Both galaxies are around 40 MLY away. They are part of a huge line of galaxies running through the Virgo cluster called Markarian’s Chain, which happens to be centered on NGC 4435. The chain is a stretch of galaxies which line up in a smooth curve. It was named after Armenian astrophysicist B.E. Markarian, who discovered their common proper motion in the early 1960s. Member galaxies include M84, M86, NGC 4477, NGC 4473, NGC 4461, NGC 4438, and NGC 4435.

NGC 4517   rating: HARD
galaxy in Virgo
RA 12h 32.8m  Dec +0d 06.4′  (2000)
Magnitude 10.4, 10×1.5′

Porrima (Gamma Virgo), our embarkation point, is a 3rd-magnitude star at the base of the “bowl” of stars holding the Virgo galaxy cluster. The bowl’s eastern rim is marked by 3rd-magnitude Vindemiatrix (Epsilon Virgo), and its western rim is defined by 4th-magnitude Nu Virgo. The bulk of the Virgo cluster sits high in the bowl, some of it above the rim, like an overloaded ice cream dish. But galaxies dribble off deep into the bowl, down to and even past Porrima. NGC 4517 is one of these, located near the bottom of the bowl roughly 3 degrees NW of Porrima. To find NGC 4517 visually, draw a line from Porrima WNW to 4th-magnitude Eta Virgo. You’ll find NGC 4517 about a degree N of the midpoint of the line.

NGC 4517 was discovered in 1784 by William Herschel, who described it as having “a pretty bright star situated exactly north of the center of an extended milky ray.” This 10th-magnitude star is a foreground member of the Milky Way and stands out prominently in any image of the galaxy.

In 1828 Herschel’s son John also recorded the galaxy as a new discovery, but with an error of 5 minutes in RA. John’s description makes it certain that he was observing the same object. His re-observation became NGC 4437, giving the galaxy two entries in the New General Catalog.

NGC 4517 is a spindle-shaped edge-on spiral galaxy – Herschel’s “extended milky ray.” In a 6-inch scope it is just visible, on the the SW side of the star noted by Herschel. In a 10-inch it appears faint and very elongated, slightly wider at the center and tapering toward each end. Visible with averted vision at 77x, it is best at just above 100x, but starts to fade into the background at powers around 250x. Deep images show that the galaxy has no visible nucleus. But it does have a bright core about 1×0.2′ in size, and a complex structure with many dark lanes.

NGC 4517 lies about 40 million light-years away, and forms a non-interacting pair with NGC 4517A, a mag. 12.2 face-on spiral 17′ to the NW.