Discovered in 1967, the obscured galaxies Maffei 1 and Maffei 2 lie just beyond the Local Group. Learn why these faint, infrared-detected galaxies are both challenging and significant for deep-sky observers.
The very faint galaxy Maffei 1 is visible in this infrared exposure made as part of a professional astronomical survey. Credit: 2MASS
- Maffei 1 and 2 are two galaxies relatively close to our Milky Way.
- These galaxies were discovered in 1967 due to their infrared light.
- They belong to the IC 342/Maffei Group, a galaxy group near our own.
- Maffei 1 is brighter but both are difficult to see due to low surface brightness.
The Herschels, Messiers, Barnards, and others did much of the early, heavy lifting of discovering and cataloguing deep-sky objects scattered around our sky. But some faint objects awaited much longer time intervals in order to be found. Such was the case with two very faint galaxies that lie relatively close to us in space but also appear close to the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, making their light heavily obscured and reduced.
Two galaxies shared this experience, only found by the Italian astronomer Paolo Maffei in 1967 as he studied their infrared light. Designated Maffei 1 and Maffei 2, they are especially interesting because they are hard to observe — a serious challenge for deep-sky viewers — but also because they are close objects, just 9.5 million light years (Maffei 1) and 9.8 million light-years (Maffei 2) away.
Initially believed to be distant members of our own Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way, Andromeda Galaxy, and Triangulum Galaxy, Maffei 1 and 2 are now assigned as members to the IC 342/Maffei Group, the closest group of galaxies beyond our own. On the sky, the two dim galaxies appear a short distance south of the sprawling emission regions called the Heart and Soul nebulae, IC 1805 and IC 1848, in Cassiopeia.
Maffei 1 is the brighter galaxy, at magnitude 11.1. It’s a lenticular galaxy that measures 3.4’ by 1.7’, but its surface brightness is very low. Maffei 2 is much fainter, glowing at about 16th magnitude, and is a barred spiral spanning 15.2’ by 7.0’. Again, an extremely low surface brightness makes this a significant challenge object for any observers.
