Galactic clouds distant but visible, come in all sizes

Last Saturday evening, I embarked on a comet-hunting adventure. Clouds over the Otago Peninsula meant I had to drive halfway to Middlemarch before finding a clear sky. I set up my telescope on a remote track, located the comet and began a sequence of photographs. With my camera snapping away, I could start to relax. Digging out my deck chair from the car’s boot, I poured myself a cup of tea and began enjoying some late-summer stargazing. Despite my passion for high-tech astronomy, much like the protagonist in Walt Whitman’s poem When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, I also enjoy looking up in perfect silence at the stars.

As someone who grew up in the United Kingdom, the southern sky is far more beautiful than its northern counterpart. The sight of the centre of our home galaxy, the milky way, high overhead in winter is undoubtedly awe-inspiring when you first encounter it. But there are two other reasons the southern sky is genuinely unique, and as I noted from my Strath Taieri perch last week, both are visible high in the sky at this time of year.

I am talking about the Large and Small Magellanic clouds. Never setting from this part of the world, they are visible as two fuzzy patches of light, one large and one small. While they are easily visible from dark locations, these satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are so bright that I have managed to spot them from Dunedin’s Octagon. That’s not bad considering they are more than one hundred and sixty thousand light-years away!

Despite being very easy to see, the clouds of Magellan are in relatively obscure constellations. The Large Magellanic Cloud is in Dorado (the Goldfish!), while its smaller sibling is in Tucana, the Toucan.

The moon is new on Monday evening. The lack of moonlight makes the next few nights the perfect time to explore the clouds of Magellan. Make sure you scan them with a good pair of binoculars; their rich star fields are truly magnificent.