Skyguide - Selected objects for every season
The Skyguide is primarily intended to give suggestions for your own observations and will briefly describe selected objects for each season of the year. Both easy and difficult objects will be selected. How difficult an object is depends of course on several factors, especially sky quality, telescope aperture and experience of the observer.
For each object the most important information is given in short form. These are supplemented by photos or sketches. Furthermore, a map, created with the free software Cartes du Ciel (Skychart), is available for a rough orientation. In general, I recommend, to create your own finder charts. The visual description of the object is based mainly on own observations and should serve only as a starting point.
Skyguide 2024-4 (Winter)
This winter, we want to accompany Auriga on its journey. The constellation is already very striking to the naked eye. With binoculars, the prominent open clusters in particular offer a fantastic view, which appear very different visually. Messier 36 presents itself more as a compact, bright group of stars, while Messier 37 appears larger and much richer in stars. Messier 38, on the other hand, looks much fainter and irregular. In low-magnification binoculars, all three clusters can even be observed together, which is a rewarding sight. Depending on the magnification, the clusters can be resolved into individual stars with binoculars. Experienced observers will certainly also be able to see the open cluster NGC 1907 near Messier 38, even if it can only be seen as a small, faint brightening.
Within the constellation, an elongated brightening is conspicuous to the naked eye. This is the cluster Melotte 31, which extends over 2 degrees across the sky and is therefore also a nice target for binoculars. The cluster shows a number of stars of very different brightness without any recognizable concentration, which are loosely distributed and arranged elongated. In the north-east of the cluster, an asterism dominates, to which the stars 16 to 18 Aurigae belong. This is often referred to as the “Flying Minnow”. With a larger instrument, more and more fainter stars also emerge, as the sketch by René Merting shows very nicely.
Northeast of Melotte 31 lies the small, rather inconspicuous cluster Stock 8, which is embedded in the nebula IC 417. A UHC filter is recommended for observing the nebula. In the center of the cluster is a multiple star system consisting of STF 707, BU 889 and SKF 2417. The pairs BU 889 AB (mv = 9m.4 / mv = 10m.0) at an angular separation of 1 arcsecond and STF 707 AE (mv = 9m.4 / mv = 10m.8) at an angular separation of 18.3 arcseconds are particularly interesting. To the north of Stock 8 the carbon star OP Aurigae is located, whose brightness varies between 12m.8 and 15m.6 with a period of about 500 days. At maximum, it could show its colorful side in larger telescopes.