spectacular Messier object - M 40 / Winnecke 4 (Alex)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa) · Contains: 70 UMa · HD107949 · M 40 · NGC 4284 · NGC 4290 · NGC 4335 · NGC 4358 · NGC 4362 · NGC 4364 · The star 70UMa

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spectacular Messier object - M 40 / Winnecke 4

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spectacular Messier object - M 40 / Winnecke 4

We recently started a Messier photo project in our astronomy club "Sternfreunde Nidderau" with the aim to capture (almost) all Messier objects in the next two years.

Making sure to be the 1st capturing one of the most spectacular objects I took M40 :-)

With only 25min exposure time, surely this picture will seriously drop my average capturing time reported here in astrobin but ok, it's worth it and pretty sure M40 isn't captured so often anyway :-)

M40 maybe better known as Winnecke 4 or WNC 4 was discovered by Charles Messier in 1764 while he was searching for a nebula that had been reported in the area by Johannes Hevelius.

Not seeing any nebulae, Messier catalogued this double star instead. It was subsequently rediscovered by Friedrich August Theodor Winnecke in 1863, and included in the Winnecke Catalogue of Double Stars as number 4. Burnham calls M40 "one of the few real mistakes in the Messier catalog," faulting Messier for including it when all he saw was a double star, not a nebula of any sort.

In 1991 the separation between the components was measured at 51.7", an increase since Messier's time. Data gathered by astronomers Brian Skiff (2001) and Richard L. Nugent (2002) strongly suggested that this was merely an optical double star rather than a physically connected system. In 2016, parallax measurements from the Gaia satellite showed that the two stars involved (HD 238107 and HD 238108) are entirely unrelated, confirming the previous suggestion by Skiff and Nugent. As measured by Gaia, the two stars are 350±30 pc and 140±5 pc distant, so one is over twice as far as the other.

Source: wikipedia.org

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2660215
PixInsight job	Z3XVE3Z7JK66AL2YNDXNMYQ8EL50JVGK
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h21m57s.69
RA (top/left)	12h18m22s.72
RA (top/right)	12h18m45s.39
RA (bottom/right)	12h25m25s.85
RA (bottom/left)	12h25m16s.98

Dec (center)	+58°05′44″.7
Dec (top/left)	+58°41′18″.8
Dec (top/right)	+57°28′24″.3
Dec (bottom/right)	+57°29′57″.7
Dec (bottom/left)	+58°42′46″.3

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spectacular Messier object - M 40 / Winnecke 4

spectacular Messier object - M 40 / Winnecke 4

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spectacular Messier object - M 40 / Winnecke 4

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