I've been having the worst skies this year: few clear nights, and when there aren't any clouds, there's tons of moisture and poor transparency. Nonetheless, I tried my hand at IC-63 and IC-59, aka the \gamma Cas Nebula. Didn't get a single night of even "average" transparency before this target became unable to image due to the tree-line. Oh well
If you look right in the center of the nebula (near J 0h 58m 43.08s +61d 04m 31.2s), you'll notice a little, odd looking smudge. I can't really seem to find much on it, save for NED says there's an object
J005840.60+610439.4 which is an infrared source, and whose associated image looks like it might be right:
Looking at the same region of an
APOD image gives the following image:
And SIMBAD gives a bit
more information and calls it Ced 4a, a "nebula" with little other information. It shows up tangentially in a number of studies, but a brief perusal of a couple of them didn't turn up anything concrete save for essentially "there's a thing here." It never ceases to amaze me how vast the universe is!
It piques my curiosity that there's a circular region approximately equidistant from this "Ced 4a nebula". If I knew more about astrometry, I'd try to figure out if the Gama Cas nebula is anywhere near Ced 4a physically.
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