The Outer Limits

 

The Outer Limits was a TV series that ran on ABC from the fall of 1963 to early 1965. It was similar to the more widely popular The Twilight Zone. As a youngster, I saw a few episodes of The Twilight Zone, but since I was only 2 years old when the first episode of The Outer Limits aired, and not to mention that we couldn't pick up ABC on our family's television set, I can't say that I saw any of the original broadcasts. It would be many years later when I first heard of The Outer Limits.

Of course, most amateur astronomers in the 1980s and 1990s became familiar with the old TV series, mainly because of its closing credits that were superimposed onto pictures of some of the best deep-sky objects taken by the world's largest telescopes. As I mentioned in an earlier post (or two), the average person didn't get to see many pictures of celestial objects in the media during those years. So, whenever there was a show like The Outer Limits or Star Trek, with pictures of star clusters, galaxies, or nebulae, we amateur astronomers were all over it! Even if these TV shows gave us only quick glimpses of some of our favorite deep-sky objects, we were proud to be able to identify them by name as they graced our TV screens, showing off our knowledge to friends and family who were unfamiliar with astronomy.

By the time I found out about The Outer Limits, I had become very familiar with a lot of galaxies and star clusters. I knew how these targets looked in the eyepiece of my backyard telescope, as well as how they looked in pictures taken with both amateur and professional equipment. I was thrilled to see some of my old favorite targets, as I watched the closing credits the first time. 

In fact, there were only 8 different objects displayed, but I scored only a 75% when I guessed their names. One of the ones I didn't guess correctly was a star cluster. The other was a galaxy. I felt mildly embarrassed for not getting a 100%.

Weird. You'd think that if there was a TV show in the 1960s that used a star cluster and galaxies in its closing credits, they would be the best known and most widely recognized objects. But the lone star cluster they picked as the first image in the sequence was not what you might expect. For example, an impressive cluster such as Messier 45, the Pleaides cluster, with its beautiful swirls of nebulosity, would have been a good choice. Even Messier 44, the Beehive star cluster, would have been a better fit. But no! Neither of these famous star clusters was selected by the producers of The Outer Limits. They picked something more obscure.

Nowadays, you can Google it and find the famous 8-object list of The Outer Limits celestial objects on Wikipedia and other websites. But when I first tried to figure it out, I had to do it the hard way and just compare The Outer Limits star cluster to pictures of star clusters I've taken. I assumed (correctly) that it had to be a Messier object, but there are a lot of Messier open star clusters to choose from! Out of Messier's 110-object catalog, 27 of them are open star clusters. Some of them are standouts, like M 6 and M 7. Or the famous "Wild Duck Cluster," M 11. Even clusters like M 41 (close to Sirius, the brightest star in the sky) might be a good choice, or M 46, with its embedded planetary nebula. 

I literally brought up my images of every Messier open star cluster and didn't find a match until I got to M 67. The little clump of five stars below the "i" in "George Pelling" above is what gave it away. And when I saw the match, I jumped for joy! I wondered how many other backyard astronomers had done the same thing for themselves and came up with the correct answer. I had nearly given up on the search. But M 67. Why M 67? What's so special about M 67? Were they just trying to stump us amateur astronomers?

All of the other pictures in the sequence are galaxies. And they happened to select some of the brightest and best galaxies that large, professional telescopes can record with exquisite detail. Anybody who has been a backyard astronomer for a couple of years can easily identify all the galaxies in the sequence. Except for one, that is! Again. Why did they pick that one? Trying to stump us again, huh?

It's not really fair. The beautiful "S-shaped" barred-spiral NGC 1300 is an excellent choice, but for those of us living in the United States who watched The Outer Limits, NGC 1300 is low in the southern sky, and best viewed in the cold months of fall and winter. At a declination of -19 degrees, it's not impossible to see. But when you're shivering in the cold and looking low in the sky at a small and dim galaxy like NGC 1300, it won't impress you enough to add to your favorites list! And remember, -19 degrees doesn't sound all that low when the galaxy is near the meridian for a couple of hours. But it's more likely that (unless you really plan ahead), at the time when you decide to turn to it as a target of opportunity, the galaxy will be on the rise or setting in the west, where the view is greatly hampered by the thickening atmosphere and often blocked by nearby trees and buildings. 

With a 12-inch aperture telescope under moderately light-polluted skies, you will see only an oval shape with no spiral arms. And the comparatively few astrophotographers of the 1960s and 1970s, who would have been able to record its spiral arms with hour-long exposures, were surely disappointed with its tiny size (about 5 arc-minutes across) in their photographs. It would be like trying to take pictures of birds without a zoom lens. The subject doesn't take up enough of the frame to make it a pleasing view. That might be acceptable in the warm daylight hours and shooting easy snapshots. But when you spend hours out there in the dark and cold, aiming, focusing, and manually guiding your exposures, you want your subjects to be seen well in your photos so that they impress everyone you share them with.

As if being not as popular as the other galaxies in the group wasn't enough, the producers used a mirrored image of NGC 1300. Not realizing that it was mirrored, I ruled out NGC 1300 at first glance. The spiral arms were obviously going the wrong way. But there aren't very many nearby S-shaped spiral galaxies that look this big and bright in photos from the world's largest earth-based telescopes at the time. I briefly considered NGC 1365, NGC 7479, and NGC 613 before coming back to NGC 1300. It was close, but when I flipped it and rotated it, I found it to be a perfect match. Why was this the only one of the 8 objects that got mirrored? Is the galaxy more aesthetically appealing as an "S-shape" rather than a "Z-shape"? Hmmm. 

Maybe they just wanted to prevent us amateurs from getting a 100%! It's a real punch in the stomach for the amateur astronomer in the room while the credits are rolling, as they smile and say, "Hey! That's NGC 5128! I know that galaxy!" Then the next picture comes up and everyone says, "Cool! What's this one called?" And the previously esteemed genius has to go, "Uh. Gee. I don't know that one."

Spoiler alert! The Outer Limits
objects identified.

The other 6 images were easy for me to identify, either because they were big and bright enough for me to see well in my telescopes, or else I had seen a lot of pictures of them in astronomy magazines because they were popular targets for astrophotographers. The edge-on galaxy NGC 891, for instance, is a difficult object to see in the eyepiece. The overall long and thin shape is discerned, but the dark dust lane passing through its center is undetected in small scopes. It always photographs well, however, and the dark lane is easily recorded with film or electronic detectors. Sometimes just knowing what a galaxy like NGC 891 should look like, having seen photos of it, makes it fun to track down and observe through the eyepiece. As we give it our best try under the darkest of nights and using averted vision, we convince ourselves that we might have caught just a hint of the dark lane. 

In hundreds of years' worth of observations since William Herschel discovered it, nobody had really come up with a catchy name for NGC 891. We always just called it "NGC 891." But now if you look it up on Wikipedia, you'll note that one of its modern names is "The Outer Limits Galaxy," only because of its appearance in the show's closing credits.

After I had all of The Outer Limits pictures figured out, I still wondered why these 8 objects were selected for the sequence during the closing credits by the producers. Why these 8 out of literally thousands of equally interesting celestial objects? Consider, for example, a small list of Messier object alternatives: M 1, M 8, M 13, M 16, M 20, M 27, M 42, M 51, and M 57. And I'll be honest with you: Even now as I post this, I don't have an answer to the question of "Why those 8?" 

One thing is certain: Each of the selected targets is quite different in appearance when compared to the others. If variety was the goal, then you could probably say, "Mission accomplished." On the other hand, maybe image scale was the goal. Perhaps they selected targets that were large enough to fill the background, even if there were a lot of words cluttering the screen, as in the image of NGC 5128.

If they wanted to select the most distant objects, to fit the theme of "The Outer Limits," then they were right to choose galaxies, which are the most distant objects known. But the star cluster M 67 is then extremely out of place because it lies inside of our own galaxy and therefore isn't anywhere near the realm of the outer limits of the universe. And if they were going for objects both near and far, like the wave form in the oscilloscope-like image of The Outer Limits logo (at the top of this page), then why didn't they choose to alternate between galactic and extragalactic objects?

Images of The Outer Limits objects,
taken with my telescope and camera. 

My fascination with the sequence behind the closing credits of The Outer Limits led me to assemble my own group portrait of them, with each one cropped and displayed in similar fashion to how they looked on the TV show. I have a meager 11-inch aperture telescope and shoot at the very low magnifying power of f/2 (the equivalent of a 560 mm camera lens), so I can't match the resolution of the world's best telescopes that were used to take the pictures in The Outer Limits. Even so, I attempted to match the scale. 

When I consider all of the "lists of objects" that I've gone after in my 45 years of backyard astronomy, such as the Messiers, the Herschels, the Hicksons, and the Arps, I am just as proud to have completed the short list of The Outer Limits Eight!

One more thing before I go....

If you look up The Outer Limits and watch some of the episodes through your cable TV provider, you might come across the episode "Wolf 359," which is the fascinating story of a scientist studying a planet orbiting the star Wolf 359. Wolf 359 is not a fictional star. However, modern studies have been unable to confirm whether or not it has any orbiting planets. The star gets its name from being one of many fast-moving stars catalogued by the German astronomer Max Wolf in the early 20th century. It's the 359th star in his catalogue of over 1,000 stars.

A few years ago, I took some images of Wolf 359. As one of the nearest stars to earth, Wolf 359 has a large proper motion that can be confirmed by any backyard astronomer using the time filter. Given enough time between two images that you take of Wolf 359, you'll see the shift in its position. 

In the above picture, the left side is a DSS (Digital Sky Survey) photo of Wolf 359 that was taken back in 1995. At right is a picture I took of Wolf 359 in April of 2020. I placed some blue numbers near random stars to help you compare the two photos. The shift in Wolf 359's position is roughly 75 pixels in my image, which corresponds to a displacement of about 125 arc-seconds in 25 years, or about 5.01 arc-seconds per year. Wikipedia gives the annual shift a value of 4.696 arc-seconds, so my quick and dirty backyard measurement is in pretty good agreement with the pro's! 

Located in the constellation Leo, the Lion, Wolf 359 is too far west after sundown for me right now, so I couldn't shoot "a second image" to make a good blink comparison for you here. Perhaps next year, when it comes back in season, I'll post an update to this page.