Messier 88: Spiral Galaxy in Coma Berenices

M88 is one of the finest spiral galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, though you need a fair-sized telescope and a dark sky to see more than an oval glow. It lies just inside Coma Berenices, a short hop from the cluster core.

What it is

M88 is a spiral galaxy with many tightly wound, regular arms. It lies about 63 million light-years away, and its visible disk spans roughly 130,000 light-years, which makes it a large galaxy, bigger than our Milky Way. We see it tilted steeply, so it looks like an elongated oval rather than a face-on pinwheel.

It is one of the spirals of the Virgo Cluster, together with M90 and M91 nearby. Like other spirals moving through the cluster's hot gas, it is thought to be losing some of its own gas, which slowly starves its outer disk of new stars. It is also moving away from us unusually fast, one of the highest speeds among Messier galaxies.

When to see it

From about 40°N, M88 is highest around midnight in early April and around 10 p.m. standard time (11 p.m. daylight time) in early May, reaching about 64° above the southern horizon. It is visible from most of the Southern Hemisphere as well, in the northern sky on autumn evenings.

How to find it

Find M84 and M86 first, at the midpoint of the line from Denebola, the star at Leo's tail, to Vindemiatrix (Epsilon Virginis). M88 lies about 2.3° northeast of M84. M91 is about 0.8° east of M88, and M90 about 1.7° to the southeast, so the three make a useful little triangle.

What you will see

Binoculars will show at most a faint speck under a very dark sky. In a 70–100 mm telescope M88 is a dim, elongated glow with a slightly brighter center; from the suburbs it may be hard to see at all. A 200 mm telescope under dark skies shows a clear oval with a bright core and a mottled texture along the disk, and larger scopes can hint at the spiral arms. Filters do not help.

History

Charles Messier discovered M88 on March 18, 1781, the night he cataloged eight objects in the Virgo region, and described it as one of the faintest in his list. In the mid-1800s Lord Rosse's large telescope in Ireland revealed its spiral form, and it was among the first galaxies recognized as spiral nebulae.