Catalogue · 27 objects
Galaxies, nebulae and clusters that climb well from Lapland, with the numbers we actually use when planning a night. The northern sky is our strength: anything near Cassiopeia, the Plough or Camelopardalis passes close to the zenith. The south is not — the summer Milky Way core never rises at all.
Click a column heading to sort. The filter searches every column, so try a constellation, a type or a month.
| Our notes | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| M31 | Andromeda Galaxy | Galaxy | Andromeda | 3.4 | 63.9° | Sep – Jan | A naked-eye smudge from any dark spot. Our first cooled-camera target; six hours brings out both companion galaxies. |
| M33 | Triangulum Galaxy | Galaxy | Triangulum | 5.7 | 53.3° | Oct – Dec | Large and low in surface brightness, so a real test of your sky. Pink HII regions appear after four hours or more. |
| M45 | Pleiades | Open cluster | Taurus | 1.6 | 46.7° | Oct – Feb | Seitsentähti in Finnish. The blue reflection nebula needs a dark sky and long integration; watch for halos round the bright stars. |
| M42 | Orion Nebula | Emission nebula | Orion | 4.0 | 17.2° | Jan – Feb | Never higher than 17° here. Shoot it as it crosses the meridian, around midnight in mid-January, and pray for transparency. |
| M1 | Crab Nebula | Supernova remnant | Taurus | 8.4 | 44.6° | Nov – Feb | What is left of the supernova recorded in 1054. Small: it needs 500 mm of focal length or more. |
| M81 | Bode’s Galaxy | Galaxy | Ursa Major | 6.9 | 88.3° | Dec – Apr | Passes within two degrees of the zenith. Frame it together with M82 at 400–600 mm. |
| M82 | Cigar Galaxy | Galaxy | Ursa Major | 8.4 | 87.7° | Dec – Apr | A starburst galaxy: red hydrogen filaments stream out of the disc. A hydrogen-alpha filter helps a lot. |
| M101 | Pinwheel Galaxy | Galaxy | Ursa Major | 7.9 | 77.0° | Feb – Apr | Face-on and faint. Our 11 h 40 min image from February 2026 is in the gallery. |
| M51 | Whirlpool Galaxy | Galaxy | Canes Venatici | 8.4 | 69.8° | Feb – Apr | The interacting pair is small; best at 800 mm or more. By late April the nights are already too short. |
| M97 | Owl Nebula | Planetary nebula | Ursa Major | 9.9 | 77.6° | Feb – Apr | Frame it with the edge-on galaxy M108, 48 arcminutes away. Faint, so wait for a moonless week. |
| M3 | — | Globular cluster | Canes Venatici | 6.2 | 51.0° | Mar – Apr | Roughly half a million stars. Keep subs short, around 60 s, so the core does not burn out. |
| M13 | Great Hercules Cluster | Globular cluster | Hercules | 5.8 | 59.1° | Aug – Sep | Only from mid-August, once the nights darken; by October it sinks into the evening twilight. |
| M57 | Ring Nebula | Planetary nebula | Lyra | 8.8 | 55.6° | Aug – Oct | Tiny but bright. Two-second frames through the C8 freeze the seeing; stack a few hundred. |
| M27 | Dumbbell Nebula | Planetary nebula | Vulpecula | 7.5 | 45.3° | Aug – Oct | The easiest planetary nebula of all. The faint outer halo needs several hours. |
| NGC 7000 | North America Nebula | Emission nebula | Cygnus | 4.0 | 66.9° | Aug – Oct | Huge: fits a 250 mm frame together with the Pelican. Dual-band filters cope well with town light. |
| NGC 6960 / 6992 | Veil Nebula | Supernova remnant | Cygnus | 7.0 | 53.3° | Aug – Oct | Filaments from a star that exploded 10,000–20,000 years ago. Use a mosaic or a fast wide refractor. |
| NGC 869 / 884 | Double Cluster | Open cluster | Perseus | 3.7 | 79.7° | Sep – Feb | Circumpolar and bright: a forgiving first target for any lens from 135 mm upwards. |
| IC 1805 | Heart Nebula | Emission nebula | Cassiopeia | 6.5 | 84.1° | Sep – Jan | Never sets. Pair it with the Soul Nebula in one frame at around 250 mm. |
| IC 1848 | Soul Nebula | Emission nebula | Cassiopeia | 6.5 | 83.0° | Sep – Jan | Next to the Heart; the two together span about five degrees of sky. |
| NGC 7635 | Bubble Nebula | Emission nebula | Cassiopeia | 10.0 | 83.8° | Sep – Dec | A shell blown by a single hot star. A long-focal-length target for the Esprit. |
| IC 434 | Horsehead Nebula | Emission nebula | Orion | 7.3 | 20.1° | Jan – Feb | Only 20° up for us; we attempt it on the very best transparency nights and rarely win. |
| NGC 2244 | Rosette Nebula | Emission nebula | Monoceros | 4.8 | 27.6° | Jan – Feb | Reaches 28°. A favourite for the dual-band filter during moonlit weeks. |
| NGC 891 | — | Galaxy | Andromeda | 9.9 | 65.0° | Oct – Dec | An edge-on spiral with a razor-sharp dust lane. Needs a dark sky and patience. |
| IC 342 | Hidden Galaxy | Galaxy | Camelopardalis | 9.1 | 89.3° | Nov – Mar | Dimmed by Milky Way dust, but it passes almost exactly overhead here, which helps enormously. |
| NGC 2403 | — | Galaxy | Camelopardalis | 8.9 | 88.2° | Dec – Mar | An underrated bright spiral, far north and very high from Lapland. |
| M35 | — | Open cluster | Gemini | 5.3 | 46.9° | Dec – Feb | Look for the small, much older cluster NGC 2158 just beside it. |
| M44 | Beehive Cluster | Open cluster | Cancer | 3.7 | 42.3° | Jan – Mar | Better in binoculars than in most telescopes. Fits a 200 mm frame nicely. |
Altitude
An object’s highest point in the sky depends only on your latitude and its declination. At 67.4°N, anything with a declination above +22.6° is circumpolar and never sets; anything below −22.6° never rises. Below about 25° of altitude the air gets thick and turbulent, so we treat that as our working floor.
Magnitude
Each step of one magnitude is a factor of about 2.5 in brightness. For galaxies and nebulae the number is the total light spread over the whole object, so a large mag 6 galaxy like M33 can be harder to see than a compact mag 8 planetary nebula. Surface brightness is what really counts.
Months
Summer targets like Cygnus and Lyra are only available from mid-August, when darkness returns, until they sink into the evening in October. Spring galaxies have to be caught before mid-April. Winter is long, dark and cold, and it is when we image most.