NGC 6688 - Peculiar Galaxy in Lyra. (astroeyes)

NGC 6688 - Peculiar Galaxy in Lyra.

Following the apparently endless quest for better DEC guiding, the other night I

was playing around with loading up my dec axis with bungy springs to take up the

backlash that I've got. As I have a Vixen GPDX mount, a GEM, springs don't work

too well because you can't easily get the load to act at right angles to the ota

and thus load up the dec axis. I abandoned this technique and in so doing lost

my alignment, so SS2K didn't really know where it was in the sky. I thought about trying to

load the dec axis tangentially and cobbled up an arrangement of mole grips, a

short bungy and a bottle full of water fixed to the counterweight end of the dec

RA axis! By varying the amount of water in the bottle I found I could take out

the backlash more or less anywhere in the sky by keeping the dec axis loaded

against the direction of guiding corrections.

By now I was lost, or Skysensor was, so I just pointed the telescope at a random

position in the sky and decided to not do any imaging but just work on fine

tuning the various parameters in PHD. Imagine my surprise and delight when I

found I had accidently found something quite interesting in the frame. After

taking a few shots and centring things up a bit, I fired off a bunch of 3 minute

exposures and went indoors to find out what I was looking at. I knew it wasn't

too far from Vega and by a process of trial and error decided I'd found ngc 6688

and a few friends. ngc 6688 is very odd, it's a galaxy apparently, though quite

unlike any other galaxy I've ever seen. It's a mag. 14 non-barred lenticular

galaxy with a s.b of 14.5 mags. per square arcmin. Size is about 1.6' x 1.6' and

that's all I know about it. If you can find out any more please let me know.

The guiding wasn't bad in the end and I think I may have stumbled on a technique

that might keep my dodgy old mount going a bit longer.

Original
Final
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NGC 6688 - Peculiar Galaxy in Lyra.

NGC 6688 - Peculiar Galaxy in Lyra.

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NGC 6688 - Peculiar Galaxy in Lyra.

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