backyard basics

Cosmic Perspectives
How to grasp the true grandeur of deep-sky splendors. By Phillip Kane
keep your perspective! Most of us have heard this advice in a social context. But in the telescope eyepiece where we observe objects that are unimaginably distant, large, and old its a formidable challenge to see things for what they really are. In an attempt to gain some kind of cosmic perspective, Ive found it helpful to visualize the scale of what I see through my telescope. Let me give you some examples. For starters, you can use your eyepiece to measure the physical sizes of your deep-sky targets. Suppose youre looking at Messier 13, the Hercules Cluster, and it stretches 40% of the way across your eyepieces eld of view. How many light-years wide is this star ball? To answer that, you need two pieces of information: the distance to M13 and your eyepieces angular eld of view. M13 is 25,000 light-years from Earth, give or take 10%. Deep-sky distances are hard to measure and constantly being revised, so its usually best to get them from an upto-date, authoritative website. Most of the distances in this article come from http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/messier/ objects.html, which has a wealth of good information about each Messier object. Theres a link near the bottom of the page for signicant non-Messiers. A standard Plssl eyepiece has an apparent eld of view 50 wide. At a magnication of 100, that gives a true eld
To measure your eyepieces true eld of view, select a bright star near the celestial equator from the all-sky map on page 43 or 45. Turn o your telescopes motor drive if it has one, and let the star drift from the center of the view to the edge. Time how many seconds this takes, then divide by 2. This equals the width of the eld in arcminutes.

of view of 50 / 100 = 1/2, or 30 arcminutes. Or you can measure the true eld directly using the star-drift method described above. If M13 stretches 40% of the way across a 30 eld, its apparent diameter is 12, or 1/5. Observing guides list a larger size for M13 somewhere between 16 and 20. Its not surprising that visual observers cant see the clusters full extent, given the limitations of our telescopes, observing sites, and eyes. In fact, Ive grown to enjoy comparing my own estimates of objects sizes against the ocial estimates. Now, if your eyepiece had a 1 eld of view, it would just t an object 1 light-year across at a distance of 60 lightyears. (The actual factor is 57.3, the number of degrees in a radian, but 60 is close enough and a lot easier to work

CONCEPT: PHILLIP KANE; ALL IMAGES EXCEPT PLEIADES: NOAO / AURA / NSF & INDIVIDUAL PHOTOGRAPHERS, INCLUDING TOM BASH / ADAM BLOCK / JOHN FOX / FLYNN HAASE / DIETMAR KUPKE / PAUL MORTFIELD / BILL SCHOENING / RYAN STEINBERG

This is how some familiar objects would look if they were all 440 light-years from Earth, the distance to the Pleiades (M45). All would be readily visible to the unaided eye, though dim enough that the colors would appear much more muted than in these photos.

M1

M27 M57 M45 M42 M11

M13

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Sky & Telescope September 2007 83

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with.) So at a distance of 25,000 light-years, a 1 eyepiece spans approximately 25,000 / 60 420 light-years. Since M13 appears to be 1/5 wide, the part you can see must be about 420 / 5 = 84 light-years across. Or if you prefer to use its ocial size of 1/3, M13 is about 420 / 3 = 140 lightyears across. How Big Is 140 Light-Years? To get some perspective on that gure, try visualizing the clusters diameter in terms of the 4.4 light-years separating the Sun from its nearest stellar neighbor, the triple star Alpha Centauri. The Hercules Cluster is 32 times that wide, and there are upwards of a million stars packed into it! For more tips on stargazing with your Another example: how would the separation telescope, see the of the Sun from Alpha Centauri project onto the How To section of Crab Nebula, Messier 1 in Taurus? SkyandTelescope I can t M1 about 8 times across an eyepiece .com with a 0.5 eld of view. At the Crabs distance of 6,300 light-years, that eyepiece spans about 0.5 6,300 / 60 52 light-years. So the visible part of M1 is 52 / 8 = 6.5 light-years long. Thats almost 50% bigger than the distance from the Sun to Alpha Centauri. At our current space-probe velocities of 40,000 kilometers (25,000 miles) per hour, it would take 115,000 years to travel to Alpha Centauri and 170,000 years to traverse the Crab Nebula. Cosmic perspective! How Bright Are Those Stars? Now that weve used our imagination to place the Sun and Alpha Centauri in the Crab Nebula, the obvious next question is, how bright would they look at that distance? More realistically, what would they look like in the company of

4.4

l-y

Sun

Alpha Centauri

S&T: DENNIS DI CICCO

The two Pleiades stars marked here are nearly identical to the Sun and Alpha Centauri in intrinsic brightness and in their projected separation from each other.

some stars that youre used to viewing like the ones in M11, the Wild Duck Cluster in Scutum, which at 6,000 light-years is nearly as far away as the Crab? The answers not hard to compute. The Suns absolute magnitude is 4.8 thats how bright it would look from a standard distance of 10 parsecs, or 32.6 light-years. The Wild Duck is 184 times farther than that, so if the Sun were there (or in M1), it would appear a factor of 1842 fainter than magnitude 4.8. Checking the graph below, youll nd that this works out to magnitude 16.1 too faint to see in any but the very largest backyard

GAINING PERSPECTIVE

The slanted lines tell how bright various stars would appear at dierent distances. Each star other than the Sun (the lowest line) is marked at its actual distance and brightness. You can use this dia-

gram to nd out how bright a deep-sky objects stars really are. For instance, all the stars that most telescopes show in M13 are more luminous than Vega but less luminous than Polaris.

5
Vega Pola r Sun is

Apparent magnitude

Den

Visible to naked eye

eb

COMPUTE IT YOURSELF Here are the formulas to nd any objects actual size, and the apparent magnitude of any star, at any distance. Let d = distance to object in light-years, and a = angular size of object in degrees. Then s, the width of the object in light-years, is given by s = da 180
SOURCE: PHILLIP KANE

5 Visible in 10 50 binoculars

10

Visible in 12-inch telescope 15 Visible in CCD image 30 100 300 1,000 3,000 10,000 30k

In addition, let MV = stars absolute magnitude (4.8 for the Sun). Then V, the stars apparent magnitude at distance d, is given by V = MV + 5 log10(d) 7.6 For example, to nd the apparent magnitude of the Sun, use

Distance (light-years)
Big Dipper Pleiades (M45) Orion Nebula (M42) Wild Duck Cluster (M11) Hercules Cluster (M13)

V = 4.8 + 5 log10(d) 7.6 = 5 log10(d) 2.8

84 September 2007 Sky & Telescope

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telescopes. This lets you know that the members of the Wild Duck Cluster visible in your eyepiece are intrinsically much brighter than the Sun. The Pleiades Poster Because its so close to Earth, the Pleiades cluster (Messier 45) is particularly enlightening when visualizing the 4.4-light-year separation between the Sun and Alpha Centauri. With good sky conditions, most people can see at least the six stars of the Pleiades dipper asterism, which is almost exactly 1 across. At the clusters distance of 440 light-years, this equates to a diameter of 7.5 light-years. If the Sun were in the Pleiades, it would appear magnitude 10.5 easy to see through a telescope, and detectable with good binoculars under a dark sky. The Alpha Centauri system would be a little brighter, magnitude 9.7. And the 4.4-lightyear separation between them would span 34 in the sky. (This is viewing the Pleiades as a at, two-dimensional map. In reality, two stars could be quite far apart in space but still appear side by side from our earthly perspective.) On the photograph at left Ive marked two stars whose brightnesses and separation almost precisely match what the Sun and Alpha Centauri would have if they were placed in the Pleiades. Once youve located these through a telescope, its hard to look at the Pleiades without seeing this amazing model of our two closest stars! Now replace light-years by miles, and imagine the Pleiades on a poster so huge that the dipper asterism is 7.5 miles wide. If you were to place this poster 440 miles away and view it through your telescope, it would look just like the real thing. By a wonderful coincidence, there are 63,360 inches in a mile and 63,240 astronomical units (a.u.) in a light-year. (An a.u. is the average distance from Earth to the Sun, about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.) Picture yourself driving 440 miles to this poster, placing a microscopic dot 1 inch from the star representing our Sun, and driving back home to your telescope. Two points 1 inch apart wouldnt stand out on this poster, but thats how big a properly scaled model of the Sun and Earth would be. We live in a truly huge universe! Bringing Faraway Things Near The last perspective deals with the relative sizes of star clusters and nebulae. The Wild Duck Cluster appears to be much
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smaller than the Pleiades, but is that just because its farther away, or is the Wild Duck really smaller? To answer that, turn to the photomontage on page 83, where Ive shown a selection of deep-sky showpieces as they would appear if they were all at the same distance as the Pleiades. The tables below show statistics for a wider selection of objects, and more data are available on the Web as an Excel spreadsheet at SkyandTelescope.com/ cosmic_perspectives. If you compare the true sizes of open clusters, youll see that they range from relatively modest ones like the Pleiades to whopping NGC 869 and 884, the members of the Double Cluster in Perseus, each of which would be 8 across nearly the size of the Big Dippers bowl. What a sight they would make side by side! Globular clusters are generally larger than open clusters. But Messier 28, the smallest listed, isnt quite as large as the members of the Double Cluster. Planetary nebulae and supernova remnants vary greatly in size, depending on how long theyve been expanding from the star that spawned them. The Ring Nebula is relatively young and small. If it were in the Pleiades it would be just 7 across barely nonstellar to the unaided eye. Diffuse nebulae show an even larger range of sizes. The Orion Nebula, which appears so big and bright to us, is actually much smaller than M8, the Lagoon Nebula. But that in turn is dwarfed by two easily observed nebulae in other galaxies: the Large Magellanic Clouds Tarantula Nebula, and NGC 604 in M33, the Triangulum Galaxy. Both of these are too large to include in our list. If they were cen-

The Deep Sky in the Minds Eye

These tables show various objects apparent magnitudes and sizes both at the objects actual distances and as they would appear if the objects were brought alongside the Pleiades at 440 light-years. The Suns magnitude is given as it would appear at the objects actual distance. The photographs at right show M78, M8, and M42 in true relative scale, as they would appear if they were all at the same distance.

M78

Visualizing Nebulae and Supernova Remnants

Nebula Type Distance (l-y) 1,250 1,600 1,600 2,300 2,500 5,200 6,300 Size (l-y) 2.9 2.1 3.7 2.8 40 30 1.0 0.7 130 140 60 11 7 Apparent Mag. Actual At 440 l-y 7.4 8.3 4.0 8.8 7 6.0 8.4 5.1 5.5 1.2 5.2 3 0.6 2.6 Apparent Size Actual At 440 l-y 8.0 5.7 8 6 85 60 1.4 1.0 3 90 40 6 4 23 16 29 22 5 4 7 5 17 18 8 1.5 1
NOAO / AURA / NSF (2)

Dumbbell (M27) Planetary Messier 78 Orion (M42) Ring (M57) Veil Lagoon (M8) Crab (M1) Reection Emission Planetary SNR Emission SNR

Distances to planetary nebulae and supernova remnants (SNRs) are not known very accurately.

M8

If the Double Cluster were brought as close to us as the Pleiades . . .

. . . it would appear bigger than the W asterism of nearby Cassiopeia.

Visualizing Star Clusters

Cluster Pleiades (M45) Wild Duck (M11)
FRED CALVERT / ADAM BLOCK / NOAO / AURA / NSF

Type Open Open Open Open Globular Globular Globular

Distance (l-y) 440 6,000 7,100 7,400 18,300 25,100 33,900

Size (l-y) 14 24 62 65 59 146 177

Apparent Mag. Actual At 440 l-y 1.6 6.3 4.3 4.4 6.8 5.8 6.2 1.6 0.6 1.7 1.7 1.3 3.0 3.2

Apparent Size Actual At 440 l-y 110 14 30 30 11 20 18 110 3.2 8.1 8.4 7.6 19.0 23.1

Suns mag. 10.4 16.1 16.5 16.5 18.5 19.2 19.9

NGC 869 NGC 884 Messier 28 Hercules (M13) Messier 3

Double Cluster

Double Cluster

NGC 869 and NGC 884 together constitute the Double Cluster in Perseus.

86 September 2007 Sky & Telescope

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tered on the Pleiades just 440 light-years away, wed be well inside them! Visualizing the true scale of your targets brings a novel perspective to telescopic observing. If youd like to pursue it further, measure the elds of view of your favorite eyepieces, re up your spreadsheet, and bring your favorite deep-sky wonders close to home. Phillip Kane observes with a 6-inch refractor from a ranch in northeastern California. He occasionally retreats from his observing eld when he hears the scream of a nearby mountain lion.

M42

Cassiopeia

AKIRA FUJII

RYAN STEINBERG / ADAM BLOCK / NOAO / AURA / NSF

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