It may not look like it, but this has taken over three years to complete. When I originally started on this target, it looked like it had the potential to have an interesting shape. After one season of gathering data from Melbourne (15km from CBD), I believed that I could improve with more data. Perhaps ambition got the better of me as NGC 602 was a lot dimmer than what I hoped. That’s always an issue when so much time has been invested in data collection, and the results are a little underwhelming, and you hate to give up. Yup, more data required. I threw in the towel on year four and decided to call it a wrap.

This wacky looking Cosmic “Koi Nebula” for lack of a better description was just above the noise floor. The object is an outlying nebula of the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). There is a stream of matter, the part that looks like the tail of a fish leads toward the Magellanic Bridge. The Magellanic Bridge is a much wider stream of a neutral Hydrogen (HI) cloud that connects the SMC to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).

It was hard to choose the final rotation of the image. In the current presentation, it reminds me of one of those comets from an old-time “Flash Gorden” movie, the smoke trailing upward. But I still see a fish. Rotate it CCW 90 degrees and it’s a fish .

I was really taken back by the many galaxies visible in this frame. It’s really cool to be able to see so many distance structures through another structure. NGC 602 has many interior ridges suggesting shock waves from the massive young stars within.

Equipment Details:

•10 Inch RCOS fl 9.1

•Astro Physics AP-900 Mount

•SBIG STL 11000m

•FLI Filter Wheel

•Astrodon Lum, Red, Green, Blue Filters

•Baader Planetarium H-alpha 7nm Narrowband-Filter

•Baader Planetarium OIII 8.5nm Narrowband-Filter

•Baader Planetarium SII 8.0nm Narrowband-Filter



Exposures Details:

Lum 67X900 Bin 1

Red 27X450 Bin 2

Green 26X450 Bin 2

Blue 29X450 Bin 2

Ha 23X1800

SII 45XX1800

OIII 51X1800

Total Time: 86.5 hours

Thanks for looking.