How to find Messier 27 (Dumbbell Nebula), Coathangar Cluster, M71 and more in Sagitta

Salutations celestial sight seers! I'm David Fuller. Welcome to Eyes on the Sky. What's up this week? How about Sagitta the Arrow? Now, how do we find this diminutive and dim constellation in the sky? Well, we start with the Summer Triangle, which is nearly overhead for most of the northern hemisphere. If you are north of 40 degrees north latitude, like I am, if you're north of that area, then all these stars will appear more towards the southern horizon. If you live more south of where I am, all those stars will appear more towards the north. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to start at Altair, which is the apex of the Upside Down Triangle. Vega is towards the west, and Deneb is towards the east. Deneb will be the dimmer star. Vega will be the brightest one. Altair is that southern one. Start there, take some binoculars, aim them at Altair. And what will you find? Well, when we point binoculars there, all of a sudden we get a lot more stars. For example, we get Terazed, which is slightly to the north of it. That's going to be the brighter star. And we also have Alshane in the same field of view. This is about a 7 degrees field of view. This is going to be a little bit dimmer star. We're going to want to go in the direction of Altair and Terazed, except we're not going to exactly on that line. You see these stars over here that are a little bit fainter? We've got a 5.1 magnitude star, we have a 6 magnitude star. We're going to kind of go in that direction. So we follow stars that go that way, and you'll notice we lose Altair, we start to lose Terazed, and we run into this other little triangle if we go just a little bit more than a full binocular field of view that way, and that is Sagittae. Now, Sagittae is supposed to represent an arrow in the sky, and sure enough, Sagittae actually does kind of look like its own little arrow in there. It is shaped that way. I'm going to try to just show the arrow itself, and it's one of the few constellations that actually just sort of actually look like what it's supposed to look like, which is nice. However, all those stars are dim. Gamma Sagittae is the brightest one, it's only 3.5 magnitude. These other stars are very dim 4th magnitude stars, so you are going to need binoculars, most likely, to be able to see them, block as much light trespass and get away from light pollution as much as you can. However, you should still be able to see them with binoculars, even through light pollution, because even if you can only see 2nd magnitude stars, you should be able to see 3rd and 4th magnitude stars, even with binoculars, giving you that additional magnitude capture and grasp. So what exactly is in this area around this really diminutive, third smallest constellation that only covers about 80 square degrees of sky? Well, we're actually going to look a little bit away from Sagittae at the moment, and you'll see that there is a star up here towards the edge of the field of view. There's another star over here at the edge of the field of view, and we're going to kind of draw a line through those. Now, that same thing doesn't really happen in the opposite direction. You could almost say this one does, but there's no comparable star down here. So take these two stars and go in the direction of the fins, and we'll move that way, and you'll see that there's this really cool shape of stars that we can bring into our view. That's called the Coathanger Cluster because it looks like a coat hanger. It has the little hook right here, and then a nice little flat, straight set of lines along the bottom. Of course, for much of us in the northern hemisphere, that's going to look upside down most of the time, but that's okay. It's still a really cool object to look at with binoculars. Now, let me show you quickly how that would look if you did use a telescope. If you went in too far in terms of your field of view or magnification-wise, you still wouldn't be able to see all of it. Look at this. This is over a one degree field of view, which a lot of telescopes are at their lowest. You still can't get the whole thing in there. Even if we back out a little bit more to a 1.7 degrees field of view, well, maybe we can just barely kind of fit the whole thing in there, but that's pretty tough to get a 1.7 degrees field of view. So, binoculars really are your best option to look at that set of stars. So, we back our way over to the arrow again, and there's actually a Messier object in here. What we will do is now look, instead of towards the fins, we're going to look towards the arrow's shaft, and the two brighter stars that were sort of the fins end and then this brightest star of the constellation, we're going to look just about halfway in between there. You'll notice that there's this sixth magnitude star. If you center that in your telescope, we will notice that there is actually a Messier object there, right nearby, and that is going to be Messier 71. So, when we zoom in on that, close this, and zoom in, we get a bunch of faint stars, and this is not the greatest globular cluster in the world. Messier 22 and Messier 13 are certainly far, far better to be able to see in a telescope, but Messier saw this back in the 1700s, so you can see this too, even in a fairly small telescope. Do, though, use averted vision, which will help you see some of the fainter detail in here, and averted vision is when you concentrate on the object, but don't actually look at it, look slightly away from it, because that's going to help the rods of your eyes that see in lower light conditions, see that particular object better, and you'll be amazed when you do this, because you'll concentrate at it, and you'll look away, and all of a sudden, it's going to kind of pop into view and look brighter. That's partly because your eye is moving, so the object appears to be moving. We see motion out of the sides of our eyes better like that from the rods, and also the rods pick up that low light better as well, so do that, and you should be able to see that in, oh, if you're in a very dark area, you'll easily be able to see that in a 60 or 70 millimeter telescope. If you have a fair amount of light pollution, you're going to want to use four and a half inches to six inch telescope or larger to be able to capture even more stars, but do look for it. It's not too difficult to be able to find. When we back out once again, we're going to go towards the very end of the arrow's end, and I'm going to turn off the DSO so we can kind of do this without cheating, because you do want to get the idea of how this is going to look when you're actually looking. Now, remember, this is all correct image that we're looking at, so this is as if you're looking through binoculars. You want to reverse this upside down and left to right for finder scope. Between these two stars that form the end of the arrow, and depending on who you're talking, which ancient astronomer was talking, you have a different arrow head itself. This bright star, Ptolemy said was the end of it, but Johann Baeyer said, no, no, no, I think actually the arrow goes a little bit longer. We can use that as the arrowhead. We're actually going to split the difference and kind of go in between there, and then turn 90 degrees. So we've got this nice straight line of stars, and now we'll turn 90 degrees and go directly up overhead this direction. We can still have those two stars even in our field of view towards the edge, and then we're going to notice towards the other side of the field of view this M shape of stars, and you'll know you found the correct M shape, because if you do get lost and kind of go over this way, you might go, oh, well, this looks sort of like an M2. Don't get confused by that. You want to be over here, and you'll know it is because you have these two stars next to each other at the top of one of points of the M, and these two stars at the other point of the M. So when you see doubles at the top of the points, you've got the correct shape M for Messier, I suppose, and we're going to aim for the star at the bottom middle. So this is our destination right here, because directly below that is this Messier object, which is going to be the Dumbbell Nebula, Messier 27. Now, don't be fooled, because when I zoom in on this, you're going to say, oh, my gosh, Dave, that's amazing. Well, you're not going to see that. Unless you have an 18 or 24-inch telescope and really, really dark skies, you won't see that kind of color. However, what you can see, most likely, is kind of a dim, fuzzy glow. You may see 14 Vulpeculae here, which is this bright star. That's the bottom of the M that we were looking at. So there's a good chance you'll see that in your field of view. And you may see a little bit of color. You might see a hint of blue or a hint of green. And oddly enough, intentionally ruining your dark adaptation by shining a flashlight in your eye or holding your phone up to your eye or even looking at a streetlight or something, that can help you see some color, because what it will do is it'll activate the cones in your eyes. Now you don't want to use that dark adaptation like you did with Messier 71. Now you want to kill it and use the center of your eye, because the center of the back of your retina is where we see color, where we perceive those colors. And that little faint bluish or greenish may actually show up. Some people may even see hints of red if you have a large enough telescope and do that one up. If you don't see any and you just see a gray cloud, that's okay, too. This is a neat object, though, because it is the remnants of what once was a star. It's blown off its outer layers. They're expanding into space. They're still glowing. It won't be there forever. So we just happen to be living at the right period of time where we can see this once star now dying and blowing itself off into space. So Dumbbell Nebula, look for maybe two lobes kind of overlapping. If you just see one cloud, that's all right, too. But definitely look for that when you're out. And the other thing that we should look at, actually need to bring this back, we're going to swing back to a binocular field of view and look at the tops of that M shape again. And this star right here, 13 Vulpeculae, that is a very, very, very, very close double star. If you've got a telescope of four and a half to six inches or larger, you may be able to split those. That's not splitting that star nearby. It's actually splitting the two components that form this star. And then over here on the opposite side, the star that's above and slightly to the outside. So look at the two outside stars. 16 Vulpeculae, that's a double star as well. Also very close. Each of these are just barely over one arc second apart. So you're going to need really good optics, really steady skies, and you may be able to split them or it may look like an elongated little dumbbell type thing or egg shape sort of pulling apart. If you can split the space in between them, you're doing really, really well. But these are objects that are all visible that we would be able to see right near the constellation of Sagitta. And Sagitta, being that little tiny diminutive constellation, you wouldn't think there's so many great things to see there. But the Milky Way kind of runs right through this section of the sky. So it's a great place to look with binoculars and also get your telescope going in that direction as well. So that's all for this week in terms of what we'll look at for telescopes. I'll have additional information on my Facebook page and on Twitter. So follow me on those two places. We'll be able to look at what the moon is going to be doing near Venus and Mars in the morning sky. Don't miss that. That's all for this week. Keep your eyes on the sky and your outdoor lights aimed down so we can all see what's up. I'm David Fuller wishing you clear and dark skies.