Galaxy
M106 (M106)
In Canes Venatici (CVn) • Magnitude 9.1 • 19 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with M106 pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
A prominent spiral galaxy whose active nucleus generates two extra sets of "anomalous" spiral arms visible in radio waves but not in visible light — more arms than meet the eye. Water masers around its central black hole acted as an extremely precise cosmic ruler, allowing astronomers to measure M106's distance to within 3% accuracy, one of the most precise extragalactic measurements ever made.
M106 at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M106, N 4258 |
| Type | Galaxy |
| Constellation | Canes Venatici (CVn) |
| Right ascension | 12h 19m 01s |
| Declination | +47° 17' 60" |
| Apparent magnitude | 9.13 |
| Surface brightness | 13.3 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 18.6 × 7.2 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 88° |
| Best imaging months | Dec, Jan, Feb |
How to image M106
M106 sits in the constellation Canes Venatici at right ascension 12h 19m 01s and declination +47° 17' 60". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As a galaxy, M106 needs the darkest skies you can find: surface brightness, not just apparent magnitude, drives whether it will lift out of the gradient.