Spiders in the observatory

Last night, October 14^th, 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