Once you’ve had your fill of the planets, it’s time to move on to some Deep Sky Objects.. or DSOs. The first place most amateur stargazers start is with the Messier Catalog. Named for Charles Messier, a French astronomer who was more interested in finding comets than in identifying the 110 galaxies, nebulas and star clusters in the catalog that now bears his name, these objects are generally considered to be the easiest to find and offer the biggest visual bang for your buck for the beginning stargazer. Some of them you can even see without a telescope or binoculars, you just need to know where to look.

For the past few nights, I’ve been on a personal quest to find two of these objects – M65 and M66 – who along with NGC 3628 form the Leo Triplet of Galaxies.

So here you can see what I saw in my eyepiece. Click the image to embiggin. The ovals are where the three galaxies should be – M65 at the bottom, to it’s left is M66 and NGC 3628 is in the upper right.

But all I could see of the three beauties was maybe a bit of a grayish blur where M66 (the brightest of the three) should be.

So there’s the rub. And here’s the secret. Viewing DSOs with a telescope in your backyard is an exercise in learning to see. You have to relearn everything you know about looking.

I’ve learned one technique called ‘averted vision.’ It’s the art of looking not directly but just slightly away from something. There’s a real scientific explanation for why this works, something about the rods and cones away from the center in the back of the eye being more sensitive to dimmer light than the ones in the dead-on center. In this case it helped me confirm that the slight haze and blur around that M9 star was, in fact, the galaxy M66. I got this buy looking away, towards the star between the three galaxies.

Tonight the forecast calls for rain and clouds so I won’t get to go outside again. Maybe over the weekend I’ll have better luck.