Galaxy
Surfboard Galaxy (M108)
In Ursa Major (UMa) • Magnitude 10.7 • 8.7 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Surfboard Galaxy pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
An edge-on spiral galaxy in Ursa Major with a clumpy, dust-mottled appearance caused by patchwork dust lanes and star-forming regions viewed along the disk. M108 and the Owl Nebula (M97) appear together in the same binocular field — a galaxy and a planetary nebula sharing a frame, separated in reality by about 45 million light-years.
Surfboard Galaxy at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M108, N 3556 |
| Type | Galaxy |
| Constellation | Ursa Major (UMa) |
| Right ascension | 11h 11m 31s |
| Declination | +55° 40' 12" |
| Apparent magnitude | 10.70 |
| Surface brightness | 13.7 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 8.7 × 2.2 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 79° |
| Best imaging months | Dec, Jan, Feb |
How to image Surfboard Galaxy
Surfboard Galaxy sits in the constellation Ursa Major at right ascension 11h 11m 31s and declination +55° 40' 12". 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, Surfboard Galaxy needs the darkest skies you can find: surface brightness, not just apparent magnitude, drives whether it will lift out of the gradient.