UGC 10822 The Draco Dwarf Galaxy (lowenthalm)

UGC 10822 The Draco Dwarf Galaxy

I have been trying to see The Draco Dwarf for a couple of years now. Its one of the galaxies in our local group being only 260,000 light years away, and is in fact one of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies. Its listed as a visual magnitude 11.2 elliptical galaxy in some catalogs, but this is a total misnomer, as far as I can tell. Elsewhere its called a dwarf spheroidal, which seems much more appropriate. It has a very low star density, so does not have the "haze" of a typical elliptical, which is what makes it so difficult to see, as the stars in the galaxy seem to be all well dimmer than 18th magnitude. So my approach changed from searching for a faint fuzzy to imaging, essentially, a distant star cluster. You can see it in this image as the oval concentration of stars at the center of field that doesn't quite fit into the top and bottom of the field. Quite a few more distant background PGC and uncatalogued galaxies of various types are also visible. None of them are brighter than 16th magnitude.

Seeing was good, so I thought it would be worth trying to image the faint stars in this galaxy. The galaxy turned out to be delicate and quite pretty!

Original
Final
C

C

Description: New version that fixes vignette and prevents bright star color blow out. Not totally happy with the results, but its better than it was.

Uploaded: ...

Astrophotography with Dobson

All
Bests: Unusual objects
Galaxies - Dwarfs & Irregulars
Galaxies of our Local Group
Galaxies - small and unusual
Hancock

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Status	Basic failed
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Astrometry.net job	2472455
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