Messier 95 - "Theta Galaxy"
Messier 95 is a Hubble-type "SBb" barred spiral with an apparent magnitude of 9.8mag and an size of 7.4'x5.0' arcminutes, located about 33 million
light-years from Earth. It was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Méchain and was later included by Charles Messier into his famous catalog.
The galaxy belongs with 8-24 other galaxies to a galaxy group around Messier 96, to which by the way also the so-called "Leo Ring" belongs - a
ring-shaped cloud of hydrogen and helium with a diameter of 650,000 light-years.
Messier 95 has a true diameter of 70,000 light years and an absolute magnitude of M=-20.2mag, which corresponds to a luminosity of 11 billion suns.
The innermost central region is formed by a bar surrounded by a circular ring. In this region with a diameter of 2,000 light-years there are many active
star-forming regions with a size of up to 300 light-years. The star clusters forming within are between 5 and 16 light-years in size and contain 2-9 million
suns. Due to the large mass it is assumed that here possibly new globular clusters will form.
So far only one supernova has been observed in Messier 95: "SN 2012aw" with a brightness of 13mag. It was a type II core-collapse supernova, in which
a star with 12.5 solar masses found its end.
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Not much of all this can be seen in the telescope. But what is very exciting is the shape of this special galaxy, which looks very similar to the Greek letter
"Theta". But Messier 95 doesn't make it easy.
It was hard to see the "Theta" with 15" aperture under a dark sky - a difficult thing. And even with 20" it was not easy to observe the surrounding spiral
arms. The bar, on the other hand, is much easier and appears quite prominent with the 20" f/3 at a magnification of 270x.
