Spiders in the observatory
Last night, October 14th, I
found a face-on galaxy (vs. an edge-on galaxy; this just refers to
the orientation of the galaxy to our line of site. Face-on would be
like looking at a plate from above the plate, but I'm sure you've got
the idea by now.). The galaxy is NGC6946 in the constellation of
Cygnus, the Swan. Cygnus is also known as the Northern Cross. Looking
at the image, can you guess that the Milky Way runs thru Cygnus? All
of the stars, individual stars that is, are in our galaxy, which is,
of course, the Milky Way galaxy. That also means that the stars are
foreground stars (they are between us and NGC6946). 6946, also know
as the Fireworks Galaxy, is about 10 to 20 million light years away.
I guess someone's tape measure ran out, so they had to estimate the
distance; that's a factor of 2 in the estimation. I guess I shouldn't
give them too hard of a time; the methods of estimation for that
distance are all indirect methods and very hard to do. I guess I
should cut them some slack. I guess that 3 sentences in a row I've
started with “I guess”, (nope...4). Sorry. I don't know if anyone
but me reads this, so I'm just having fun...
This image was tough. Tracking
problems. Focusing problems. I can't say it's one of the best, but
still not too bad. Maybe I'll try again on this one later. When I was
processing the image, and just beginning to “pull” the image of
the galaxy out of the background, my first impression was, “this
thing looks like a spider!” Well, it's fall, and there are spider
webs all around; I guess I had spiders on the brain. What do you
think?
 | |
| NGC6946 |
Same equipment and standard processing
