The Caldwell Objects

to show how the galaxy's western region may be
the remnant of a tidal event that triggered the
most recent star-formation episode.
If you live under dark skies, seeing Barnard's
Galaxy should not be challenging. I had no
problem sweeping it up in a 4-inch at 23x, given
my telescope's nearly 3° field of view. In fact, I
just pushed the telescope tube to the dwarf
galaxy's general vicinity, and I had the object in
focus before I had finished two sweeps of the
sky. But start your search first with binoculars.
Begin at 4th-magnitude Rho 1 (ρ 1 ) Sagittarii — the
tip of the "spoon's handle" northeast of the
Sagittarius Teapot. Move 5° northeast to a pair of
5th-magnitude stars, 54 and 55 Sagittarii, which
lie only 30' apart from one another. Just ¾° to the
north-northeast of 55 Sagittarii is a magnitude-5.5
star. The galaxy is only ¾° farther to the
northeast. But don't put down the binoculars. I
challenged myself to see the galaxy with 7x35
binoculars and, after relaxing my gaze, could
definitely pick it out against the Milky Way as a
faint ghost — a uniform splotch of dim light.
With these binoculars I estimated the galaxy's
brightness to be magnitude 7.9 — nearly a full
magnitude brighter than the accepted value
listed elsewhere.
At 23x in the Genesis my first impression was
of a triangular wedge of light balanced on a
flattened pyramid of moderately bright stars.
This is how NGC 6822 appeared with direct
vision. With averted vision the galaxy swelled,
resembling a miniature version of M24 (a true
star-cloud in Sagittarius). At 72x the galaxy is a
phantom glow speckled with a multitude of
foreground stars. But when averted vision is
used, a strong needlelike bar can be seen running
down its length. Accepting a distance of 2.3
million light-years for NGC 6822, the true linear
extent of this bar is 11,400 light-years, and the
galaxy's total luminosity is about 260 million
Suns. While observing I convinced
57
myself that, beyond the dappled starlight of foreground
suns, the galaxy's haze is mottled, broken
into numerous patches. I also believed that the
faint galactic haze before me was just at the limit
of resolvability. This may not be illusory. Robert
Burnham Jr. reports that the brightest individual
stars in NGC 6822 shine at about
15th magnitude, and the estimates in his Handbook
usually run on the faint side. NGC 6822 is one of
the few galaxies that will reveal some of its
individual stars to patient observers with small
telescopes. IC 1308 is an emission nebulosity 6'
north-northeast of the galaxy's center.
The galaxy is all but lost at high power. Still,
traces of its bar can be seen with keen averted
vision. Note that the bar has some faint extensions
of starlight that look like two Es standing back to
back — a curious natural monogram for its
discoverer. Oddly, but as the last-quarter Moon
began to rise one night while I was looking at NGC
6822, the galaxy seemed to pop into view with
sharper clarity at 23x and take on a pale green
tinge. Is this
The Caldwell Objects 229