https://www.space.com/hubble-photo-blue-spiral-galaxy-ngc-2336

December and January are challenging months for astrophotography in Julian, CA. It's either cloudy, windy or just very poor seeing even when it feels so calm.

I decided to switch back to the 16803 CCD as I was planning on taking lengthy Ha for an M82 revisit. The 6200 CMOS has severe fringing with an Ha filter. This would require taking sky flats. This is too much overhead for my relatively short astro visits. The 16803 does not have this fringing issue and can go much deeper in Ha with very quick light-panel flats.

I planned to shoot NGC 2336 from 7 to 9 PM and then switch to M82 from 9 PM to 5 AM with the goal of taking at least 40 hours of M82 Ha.

Then I realized that I was having some pretty rare January steadiness! So rather than "waste" that on Ha, I decided to keep going with NGC 2336. (-:

Here's 6 hours of L with 24 15-minute subs between 2.4" and 2.9" with a 2.6" average. I've had better, but rarely this time of the year. The RGB subs were between 3" and 4".


"Imagine a galaxy and what comes to mind likely looks like NGC 2336, a shimmering swirl of stars.

And just days before a software glitch temporarily shut down the Hubble Space Telescope, the iconic spacecraft sent home a stunning image of the big, beautiful, and brilliantly blue galaxy. NASA uploaded the image of NGC 2336, a galaxy located about 100 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Camelopardalis (aka the Giraffe), on Friday, March 5, 2021 two days before the telescope unexpectedly shut down. (The telescope has since resumed operations.)

In a statement about the new image, NASA calls NGC 2336 "the quintessential galaxy." NGC 2336 is a barred spiral galaxy, meaning it has a star-dense center in the shape of a bar, with arms that spiral out from the ends of the bar. The galaxy is also very large, 200,000 light-years across according to the NASA statement.

This is far from the largest galaxy to be discovered, the honor of which goes to IC 1101, which is 50 times the size of our Milky Way at 5.5 million light-years across. Still, it's on the large end of most spiral galaxies, which can measure between about 16,000 light-years and 300,000 light-years across. 

The bright blue stars twinkling throughout NGC 2336's spiral arms make the galaxy especially beautiful. These are young stars, which give off bright, blue light. At NGC 2336's center is a darker, redder area comprised mostly of older stars. 

German astronomer Wilhelm Tempel discovered this "quintessential galaxy" in 1876 using a much smaller telescope than Hubble, with a mirror about one-tenth the size of Hubble's."