DEEP SKY CHALLENGE - THE LION'S GALAXIES

The evenings of early spring are full of deep-sky objects

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Spring is known as the season of the galaxies to astronomers, as the night side of Earth is facing away from the Milky Way and out into deep space, which is littered with other such ‘island universes’ as our own. The distances to these objects are truly vast, and so we often only see them as small, hazy patches of light, but these objects are anything but small. Like the Milky Way, they  contain billions of stars, clusters and nebulae in their own right. They also come in various shapes and sizes and can be a little smaller or even a lot larger than our own galaxy. Due to line-of-sight effects, as well as gravitational ones, they can also seem to occur in groups, such as the Leo Triplet, or they might just appear as isolated misty patches of light, floating in the depths of space.