NGC6068 and NGC6068A (lowenthalm)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Ursa Minor (UMi) · Contains: NGC 6068 · PGC 2778174 · PGC 56363

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NGC6068 and NGC6068A

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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NGC6068 and NGC6068A

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

This is a nice little pair of 13th and 14th magnitude spiral galaxies hiding in Ursa Minor. They are both around 185,000 light years away from us and so are indeed a fairly close gravitationally bound pair, probably separated from one another by no more than a couple million light years.

The face-on NGC 6068 has an outer faint ring halo beyond its prominent spiral arms that just barely rises above the light pollution in my backyard. Good seeing showed a good deal of detail the galaxy, including a nice network of reddish dust lanes, one of which crosses the nucleus, and numerous bluish O-B associations and pinkish HII regions. Clearly a galaxy busy making a lot of stars.

The nearby edge-on spiral is NGC 6068A, which also carries the designation MCG+13-11-017. You can see a rather reddish nucleus and hints of narrow arcs of dust along with a couple of bluish star forming regions with lit by bright O and B stars. I suspect the nucleus might be reddened by unresolved dust lanes around the nuceus.

Each of the nine 8 minute images was a live-stack in SharpCap of 320 1.5 second subs.

NOTE: The annotations on the image are correct, but the finder chart shows Cygnus! I had to rerun the plate-solve with coordinates for the image center, but Astrobin didn't update the sky chart for some reason. This image is actually about a degree north of Zeta Ursae Minoris (Alifa al Farkadain).

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Galaxies - small and unusual

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3750656
PixInsight job	O82K71NKVOXLHOHUP3E3DM36A5VORQV0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	15h55m26s.180
RA (top/left)	15h55m56s.280
RA (top/right)	15h58m09s.110
RA (bottom/right)	15h54m55s.550
RA (bottom/left)	15h52m45s.506

Dec (center)	+78°59′34″.43
Dec (top/left)	+78°50′40″.30
Dec (top/right)	+79°04′11″.91
Dec (bottom/right)	+79°08′28″.90
Dec (bottom/left)	+78°54′52″.15

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NGC6068 and NGC6068A

NGC6068 and NGC6068A

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NGC6068 and NGC6068A

NGC6068 and NGC6068A

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