Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Pisces (Psc)  ·  Contains:  NGC 266  ·  PGC 1986918  ·  PGC 212604  ·  TYC2280-1090-1  ·  TYC2280-1210-1
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NGC266, lowenthalm
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NGC266

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
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NGC266, lowenthalm
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NGC266

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

NGC 266 is a nice classic face-on barred spiral that straddles the boundary between Andromeda and Pisces. Its fairly small at 3.3 arc minutes across, but due to its AGN core, its decently bright at 11.6 magnitude. Calculacting with the redshift data from SIMBAD, its roughly 216 million light years away which puts its diameter at around 201,000 light years across. The seeing was pretty good, so with sharpening, lots of HII regions and O-B star clusters show can be seen along both the arms, as well as a single dust lane that threads along each arm. The little fuzzy galaxy next to NGC266 is likely a companion. I couldn't find any data on it, but it looks to be a dwarf elliptical galaxy, not dissimilar to M31's companion galaxies in both size and shape.

This was an experiment in taking deeper images with many more exposures than I have in the past. The limiting magnitude of the image is a bit fainter than 21.5 in green. You can see numerous anonymous background galaxies and galaxy clusters. Pretty much every faint fuzzy is a distant galaxy! The most distant named galaxy here is PGC 1986918 at 1.1 billion light years, so the smaller dimmer fuzzies are easily 2 to 4 billion light years away. No catalogued quasars are in the field, but I am sure some lurk somewhere. There's even a white dwarf candidate (listed below in the Vital Statistics section), found and flagged in the Gaia database because its absolute magnitude calculating using its distance is around 11 and its bluish in color. No normal star is blue (ie hot!) and dim, so it must be a white dwarf. 

Each of the 78 six minute subs was a stack of 72 five second exposures live stacked in Sharpcap.

Vital statistics on a few objects in the field:

NGC266
Type: AGN barred spiral, SBabrs
Size: 3.2 x 3.1 arcmin (201 kly across)
Magnitude: 11.63(V)
Distance: 216 mly (z=0.015626)
Abs Mag=-22.48

NGC266 companion?
Type: Dwarf elliptical galaxy
Size: 18 x 18 arcsec (18 kly across)
Distance: 216 mly (z=0.015626)

PGC 1986918
Type: Galaxy
Size: 12 x 12 arcsec (65 kly across)
Magnitude: 17.76(V)
Distance: 1.107 bly (z=0.08273)
Abs Mag=-19.90

PGC 212604
Type: Spiral Galaxy
Size: 26 x 11 arcsec (113 kly across)
Distance: 897 mly (z=0.066479)

Gaia EDR3 360950185427442816
(the bluish star to the lower right of PGC 212604
Type: White dwarf candidate
Magnitude: 19.88(V)
Distance: 1,522 ly
Abs Mag=11.54

TYC 2280-1090-1 (BD+31 122)
Type: Spectroscopic Binary Star
Spectra: K2
Magnitude: 8.14(V)
Distance: 2,203 ly
Abs Mag=-1.01 CI(B-V)=1.44

TYC 2280-1210-1
Type: Type IV Sub-giant Star
Spectra: F5
Magnitude: 11.11(V) 
Distance: 1,614 ly
Abs Mag=2.64 CI(B-V)=0.46

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    NGC266, lowenthalm
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B

Description: Cleaned up the clipped brighter stars

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NGC266, lowenthalm

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