In the photograph, M106's appearance is dominated by two bright spiral arms and dark dust lanes near the nucleus. Bright newly formed stars near their outer tips distinguish the spiral arms where the young star clusters are seen as blue patches. The nebulae, which still form stars, are seen as reddish or pinkish spots. The older population gives the nuclear region a more yellowish appearance.

M107 is a very loose globular cluster in the constellation Ophiuchus. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in April 1782 and independently by William Herschel in 1793. It wasn't until 1947 that Helen Sawyer Hogg added it, and three other objects discovered by Mechain, to the list of Messier objects.

At a distance of about 20,900 light years from Earth, M107 is close to the galactic plane. There are 25 known variable stars in this cluster.

M108 is a type Sc spiral galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major, seen almost edge-on. This galaxy shows little or no bulge and no pronounced core, being a motley collection of features often referred to, in classic understatement, as very dusty. The spiral structure is not very clearly delineated. M108 is around 45 million light years away in a loose galaxy grouping, the Ursae Major Cloud, which includes M109.

There are few HII regions and young star clusters exposed against the chaotic background and little evidence for a well-defined spiral pattern.

M108 is quite easy for the amateur to find as saucer-shaped elongated object with a quite bright and irregular central region, surrounded by light and dark nodules. It is actually surprising how much detail can be seen in this galaxy with small instruments. Colour photos show a more conspicuous appearance, often appearing in wide field and deep spatial depth photographs together with the Owl nebula M97, which is only about 48' to the SE.

M109 is about 7-by-4 arc minutes in angular extent, and of apparent visual magnitude 9.6. Visually, the bright central region together with the bar are the obvious, and appear pear-shaped in smaller telescopes with a granular texture.

According to Brent Tully's Nearby Galaxies Catalogue, M109 is about 55 million light years distant and is receding at 1142 km/sec. M109 is a member of the Ursa Major Cloud, a giant but loose agglomeration of galaxies. Tully took individual distances from the redshift in a model taking the Virgo-centric flow into account. The distance of this galaxy, however, may be a bit smaller, as the average recession in this cloud is lower, and some part of the surplus may be peculiar velocity. In a newer article (1996), Brent Tully and his coworkers establish the existence of this Ursa Major Cluster, as they now call it, by identifying 79 member galaxies including M109.

This very sharp telescopic image features the last object in the modern version of Charles Messier's catalogue of bright clusters and nebulae - Messier 110. A dwarf elliptical galaxy, M110 is actually a bright satellite of the large spiral galaxy Andromeda, making M110 a fellow member of the local group of galaxies. Seen through a foreground of nearby stars, M110 is about 15,000 light-years across. That makes it comparable in size to satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Though elliptical galaxies are normally thought to be lacking in gas and dust to form new stars, M110 is known to contain young stars, and faint dust clouds can easily be seen in this detailed image at about the 7 and 11 o'clock positions relative to the galaxy centre.

M110 is at about the same distance as the Andromeda galaxy M31, about 2.9 million light years, as confirmed by Walter Baade in 1944, when he resolved it into stars (Baade 1944). It is of Hubble type E5 or E6 and is designated "peculiar" because it shows some unusual dark structure (probably dust clouds). M110 is now often classified as a dwarf spheroidal galaxy, not a generic elliptical one (making it the first ever known dwarf spheroid). However, as it is much brighter than typical dwarf spheroids, Sidney van dan Bergh has recently introduced the term "Spheroidal Galaxy" for this and similar galaxies, including Local Group members NGC 147 and NGC 185. M110's mass was estimated to be between 3.6 and 15 billion solar masses.

Despite its comparatively small size, this dwarf elliptical galaxy has also a remarkable system of 8 globular clusters in a halo around it. The brightest of them, G73, is of about 15th magnitude and thus within the reach of large amateur telescopes. Steve Gottlieb has observed it with a 44-cm telescope together with M31 globulars, and amateurs at the Ferguson Observatory near Kenwood, CA obtained a CCD image showing 7 of them with their 14-inch Newtonian and CB245 CCD camera.

The lower image shows M110 and the Andromeda Galaxy.