52 ASTRONOMY • APRIL 2020

Spring is galaxy

season, and no

constellation

proves it better

than this one.

BY MICHAEL E.

BAKICH

Explore the

I

t’s difficult to conceive of how large Virgo is. The Maiden is the

second-largest constellation, covering 3.1 percent of the sky. It

contains 11 Messier objects, tons of worthy targets from the New

General Catalogue, and more faint galaxies than you can count.

In this brief guide, I want to remove the intimidation of this

constellation’s size and provide a list of the best objects to point

your scope at. I list them in order of increasing right ascension.

That means the westernmost objects come first and, as you observe,

the latter ones rise higher in the sky.

Please note that I don’t include any elliptical galaxies in this story.

They’re still plotted on the map you’ll find on the following two pages,

but I describe the best of them in “The sky’s best elliptical galaxies,”

which begins on page 58.