Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)  ·  Contains:  Fireworks Galaxy  ·  NGC 6939  ·  NGC 6946
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC6939 and NGC6946, Earle Waghorne
NGC6939 and NGC6946
Powered byPixInsight

NGC6939 and NGC6946

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC6939 and NGC6946, Earle Waghorne
NGC6939 and NGC6946
Powered byPixInsight

NGC6939 and NGC6946

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

One of the joys of the RoboScopes Syndicate system is that each of us can nominate an image but we have access to all of the data produced. In this case the image was not my nomination and I am grateful for both the framing and careful selection of acquisition details.

NGC 9639 is an open cluster, located around 5,000 light years from Earth on the border of the constellations Cepheus and Cygnus constellations. It was discovered in 1798 by William Herschel. It lies about 1300 light years above the Galactic plane of the Milky Way. It is believed to be around a billion years old [1] and contains at least 22 variable stars, [2].

NGC 9646, the Fireworks Galaxy is an intermediate spiral galaxy, also at the boundary of Cepheus and Cygnus but at a distance of around 25.2 million light years from Earth and is part of the Virgo cluster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was also discovered by William Herschel in 1798. It is classed as a double-barred starburst galaxy. Several unusual objects have been observed, including the Red Ellipse, toward the end of the northern arm (top of the image) and Hodge's Complex, a blue circle in the image, around half way to the southern edge of the galaxy, which was originally thought to be a cluster of supergiant stars but, in 2016, Efremov suggested that it is actually a small galaxy moving parallel to the plane of NGC 6946 [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_6939
[2] arXiv:0711.4916v1
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_6946
[4] Yu. N. Efrenov, Baltic Astronomy, vol. 25, 369{376, 2016

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

NGC6939 and NGC6946, Earle Waghorne