A few weeks ago, I was looking for a broadband target to shoot early before all the candy in Orion cleared the horizon. Because like so many others, I have a long-term quest to shoot all the Messier objects, I chose one I hadn't gotten to yet. I have 79 in the tank, but mostly what is left are open clusters and a few globs. I was dreading going after all the remaining open clusters. They're boring, I thought. So I thought I'd get a few hours on M39 and be done with it. But as I processed the first stacks, I started seeing some interesting things--dark chocolate clouds, hints of hydrogen-alpha, some small but interesting galaxies, cold molecular clouds, and even a nifty little planetary nebula off to the west (right).
And it turns out that it's really even more interesting than all that. M39 ostensibly contains around 30 stars with a common origin. But
recent studies using Gaia data reveal that M39 has a corona that contains hundreds of stars. Other nearby open clusters display a similar phenomenon, and Stefan Meingast has prepared a
marvelous interactive 3D map that shows the positions, depth, and breadth of these clusters, which include M39.
Here's a tight crop of the cluster itself rendering a closer look at two far away spiral galaxies on the southern boarder (upper left) of M39--the edge-on PGC167495, and the face-on spiral PGC86597. My Kung Fu is not strong enough to find much information about these two galaxies. But my guess is that they are 40 million to 100 million light years away or more.
Here's a tight look at LDN 1012:
And finally, this crop reveals the planetary nebula PK093-02.1 to the west (right) of M39 in the wide field. This is a strange one with some interesting tendrils above and below it. Again, I can't find much about this object in the literature, so I don't even know how far away it is thought to be. But I was able to discover that it's an
extremely nitrogen rich planetary nebula with an unusual morphology.
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