The (Almost) Final Four

I'm down to five. It was partly cloudy today but mainly cleared off by 9:00 so I decided to try for the final four in Coma B and Virgo: M61, M85, M88, and M91. I had tried to find these previously but had no luck. Tonight I found out why! All but 61 are in an area almost devoid of bright stars and they are super dim, all lying about 60M light years away. Armed with my pocket sky atlas I was able to hop from either Vindamiatrix in Virgo or Denebola in Leo using some of the very dim stars that the PSA shows on its chart. It took awhile though. I was out from about 9:15 to 10:45 and by the time I started hunting for M61 at the end, I was getting kind of punchy and making dumb mistakes. It was also a bit hazy from a few light high clouds moving through. At first, even fairly bright mag 4 stars would kind of come and go but it cleared up toward the end and I rewarded myself with a nice crisp view of Saturn, who was in the neighborhood, to round things out. I was able to sketch all four along with whatever stars were in the FOV of my 27mm ep but they were all nondiscript fuzzy blobs in my 8" dob. Getting to the right spot was difficult but once I had the scope pointed to the correct location, they were all four readily apparent and the sketches even match the pictures at SEDS fairly well!
M85 is closest to Denebola and there is even an Aquila-like asterism nearby that points the way to 85. M88 and 91 are closer to Vindamiatrix so I started there to find them but kept getting lost in the dim starfield along the way. There are a pair of very dim stars that bracket the two galaxies and I was finally able to find those and zero in on my targets. M61 was the easiest as the visible star 16 Vir makes almost a right triangle with Zavijava and Zaniah, two of the bright stars making up Virgo's cup. By the time I got to M61, it had cleared up enough that I could make out 16 Vir unaided, pointed my red dot at it, and zero'd right in on M61 with my 9x50 finder. It was also dim but perhaps not as much so and fairly large.