NGC6028

NGC 6028/NGC 6046 is a ring galaxy in Hercules very similar in appearance to Hoag's Object but with a more elliptical core. Redshift puts it about 210 million light-years distant. That makes it almost 80,000 light-years in size. NED classifies it as (R)SA0+: while Seligman says S0/a?. Odd he doesn't mention the obvious ring. This one was found twice. First by William Herschel on March 14, 1784 and then by Guillaume Bigourdan on May 4, 1886. Being faint it isn't in either H400 program. While Herschel's entry is NGC 6046 and came first I list these double identified galaxies in numerical order so that puts Bigourdan's find first. It also appears to have had the better coordinates.

This is another of my very early images when I did little to no research on these objects.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=1x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6028

NGC6058

The planetary nebula NGC 6058 in Hercules was discovered by William Herschel on March 18, 1787. It is in the second H400 program. At 13th magnitude, it isn't an easy object visually in my 10" scope. It does appear rather green to me in my 10" scope so I was surprised to find it quite blue in my data. While most internet images of it show it as blue a few are indeed green. Why the discrepancy I don't know. The only distance estimate I found put it at about 11,500 light-years away. One paper puts its age at 5 to 6 thousand years. At 40" in diameter, it would be about 2.2 light-years across. That seems large for the given age. It may be quite a bit older to have reached that size. That paper says it is made up of 4 separate oval shells all centered on the central star. It's been a busy 5 to 6 thousand years for this planetary. http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/rmaa/RMxAC..40/PDF/RMxAC..40_pguillen.pdf

Being in Hercules there are a lot of background galaxies though most had no distance data in NED. All that did are shown in the annotated image.

Due to the brightness of the central star, I used 5 minute subs for the luminance frames and still saturated the central star. By taking 10 of them I get somewhat the same depth as 4 10 minute frames (12 is better but not enough darkness for that in late June) due to the rather high read noise of my camera. This posed a problem when I went to process this data many months later. I found I had no 5 minute darks taken at the -20C temperature. In fact, I had no darks at -20C for any exposure, so scaling was out as I've had good success scaling down as to time but never as to temperature. I had to make do with new darks taken many months later. Not a great match as the camera has aged over those months but better than nothing. Fortunately, the color frames were taken a different night and I correctly set it for -25C for which I did have good darks. How I messed up and used -20C for the luminance I can't fathom.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=10x5' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6058

NGC6070

NGC 6070 is a multi-arm spiral galaxy whose arms start far from the core. It has a bright core surrounded by many star clusters that merge into a pseudo-ring at my resolution but show as separate clusters in high-resolution images. Then there's a rather featureless red region with the blue arms starting beyond the red disk. There is a hint of one arm in this region, however. http://kudzu.astr.ua.edu/gvatlas/scd/ngc6070.html

The SA(r)cd galaxy is about 100 million light-years distant and located in southeastern Serpens Caput. The 6.7 magnitude HD 145204 made it a pain to process as it, plus high humidity (light fog) and strong airglow caused a nasty gradient across the entire frame. Low transparency from high humidity and strong airglow reduced my limiting magnitude by about 1.5 magnitudes so this one doesn't go as deep as usual but seeing was better than most nights this May so I took what the night gave me. The galaxy is sometimes called NGC 6070A with others labeled B and C but the scheme for this varies with who you look to. For the annotated image I used NED's nomenclature. While NED has NGC 6070C NED02 when I asked for NGC 6070C NED01 it said it had no such object! Others call it NGC 6070B and what NED calls NGC 6070B NED 02 as NGC 6070A. For even more confusion on naming these see: http://freescruz.com/~4cygni/astro-app/essays/NGC6070-update.htm Have plenty of aspirin handy or better yet a bottle of Jack Daniels.

NGC 6070 was discovered by William Herschel on September 18, 1786. It is in the second Herschel 400 observing list from the Astronomical League and a rather photogenic spiral that's little imaged. That gave me enough to put it on my to-do list.

After having so many fields in which even the very faint galaxies were listed in some catalog with a short designation I seem to be out of that region of the sky. Nearly all the galaxies and quasars in this image had only designations that were their sky coordinates out to many decimal places making them too long for labeling. I had to go back to my old system of listing these simply as G or Q for Galaxy or Quasar. Some galaxies I'd have liked to have redshift data didn't. I've labeled all that did and skipped those that didn't even if "big and bright", or large, faint and fuzzy.

It seems the NGC 6070B and C galaxies are the large members of a group of galaxies located at about 580 million light-years. They are mostly red though NGC 6070B NED02 has a blue arc of stars to the southeast. Is it interacting with NGC 6070B NED 01? I found nothing on this but I suspect this might be the case and possibly the cause of the blue arc. NGC 6070 is about 110,000 light-years across, NGC 6070B NED02 about 100,000 light-years across and NGC 6070C NED02 about 90,000 light-years in size. Thus they are all rather large galaxies though the distant ones seem to have a higher population of old red stars.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6070

NGC6090

Mrk 496/NGC 6090 is a pair of merging galaxies, a bit over 400 million light-years distant in Draco. They remind me of the Antenna galaxies, Arp 244 but for some reason, these didn't make it into his atlas and they did. The northern galaxy is quite red while the southern is blue. Both are listed at NED as being Sd pec starburst galaxies. Nearby is CGCG 275-028 an E0 galaxy with plumes. Did it also interact with Mrk 496 or one of its galaxies or is the plume due to some other unfortunate galaxy it consumed in the recent past? While there's information on Mrk 496 I found little on this companion. The third major galaxy in this field is UGC 10261. The three comprise the WBL 610 galaxy group though UGC 10261 is not at all related to the other two galaxies. In fact, it seems to be the major galaxy in its own galaxy cluster SDSS-C4 3095 which NED lists as having 24 members. I find some 23 galaxies at its approximate distance of 840 million light-years in the frame. NED gives no angular size for the cluster. It appears to cover much of the right half of my image. It is a huge galaxy that I measure at over 300,000 light-years in size. It dwarfs Mrk 496 which I measure at only 51,000 light-years for the two galaxies themselves. Adding in the plumes they are much larger at a bit under 300,000 light-years so again UGC 10261 without plumes still beats it. CGCG 275-028 including plumes is only 100,000 light-years in size. Ignoring the plumes it is only 37,000 light-years in size. NGC 6090 was discovered by Lewis Swift on June 24, 1887.

The field contains one flat galaxy, FGC 2000 and below it a blue star-like object listed as SHOC 528, a blue compact galaxy. The SHOC is the Sloan HII galaxies with Oxygen abundance Catalog. Why it isn't the SHGOAC I don't know. Can't be pronounced "Shock" I suppose is the main reason. There are a half-dozen or so quasar candidates (UvES) in the image but only 1 NED considers proven.

I had thought the first two blue frames had been hit by clouds. They were fine but since they were considered lost to clouds the system retook them so I ended up with 4 good blue frames. That improves the signal to noise ratio of the blue data over the green and red but doesn't skew the color balance, so I used all 4.

For Hubble's "somewhat" better version (east at the top rather than north) of this galaxy see: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2008/16/image/bx/ This was taken on one of my best nights of the year so finally I'm going deep, something conditions have prevented for many months now. Due to this, I was able to pick up many of the rather faint galaxies in the HST image. HST shows detail in them while they are just blobs for me but at least many are there.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RG=2x10' B=4x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6090

NGC6100

NGC 6100 is a ring galaxy in eastern Serpens Caput just about on the celestial equator that is about 230 million light-years from our galaxy and 110,000 light-years across. It was discovered by Lewis Swift on July 3, 1886. He's likely more famous to amateur astronomers for his shared discovery of comet Swift-Tuttle that's responsible for the Perseid Meteor Shower each August. NGC 6100 has both an outer blue ring and an inner pseudo-ring. The area between these came out quite red in my image which surprised me. Oddly the Sloan image shows it more a muddy brown color. I'm not sure why the difference though Sloan picks up 4 bands beyond our visual range that often skews its color. A likely background galaxy is seen through the outer ring to the northeast (upper left). NED shows nothing at its position, another surprise. It's clearly a reddish galaxy that didn't make it into any catalog NED carries.

I was hoping to find something on this galaxy but I can't find any paper having ever discussed it other than to list it in a catalog. A second ring galaxy appears in my image to the far left edge nearly halfway between the center line and top of the image. It is listed simply as G 0.075 in the annotated image as it is only found in the IR source 2MASS catalog that uses only its coordinates for identification. It has a bright core surrounded by a very faint outer ring. Again the area between the two appears somewhat red in color.

Most galaxies in the field suffered the same fate as this one. That is, they are listed only in catalogs that use coordinates for identification, mostly 2MASS and/or Sloan catalogs. Those, as mentioned, are just labeled as G or Q for quasar. Some rather bright galaxies have no label as they too were only identified by coordinates but had no redshift or other distance data available at NED.

Seeing wasn't all that great the night this was taken. It started cloudy so I hadn't opened the roof to cool the scopes when it suddenly cleared. I took the 4 luminance frames right after opening and thanks to the scope not having come to temperature there were tube currents that made for wonky stars. That cleared up just as I started the color frames. Being faint I took twice my usual color data though one green was lost when a boater hit the observatory with a multi-million candle power spotlight looking for his marker buoy. The next night I took 4 more luminance frames planning on using those to replace the first series taken with the tube currents. But that night was of even poorer transparency and while the stars were good that series didn't go as faint. So I ended up processing both then combining them in lighten mode. That filled in the wonky stars to some extent without losing the fainter objects. Stars are still far from perfect but a lot better and the signal to noise ratio of the image somewhat improved as well.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RB=4x10' G=3x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6100

NGC6106

NGC 6106 is a rather ragged Sc spiral galaxy in southwestern Hercules about 70 to 75 million light-years away. It was discovered by William Herschel on April 13, 1784. It is in the second Herschel 400 observing program. The only other major galaxy in the frame is UGC 10337/PGC 057827. it is a rather red edge on Sb spiral.

There is what I see as a bright star about 5 seconds of arc southwest of the core. NED, however, claims it is is the galaxy NSA 166863. They give it a magnitude of about 13 which is correct and a size of 2.4x0.9 minutes which can't be right. They also give it a redshift of virtually zero which is to be expected for a star in our galaxy. The size and brightness are only slightly less than what they quote for NGC 6106. It appears somehow their automation decided that it was the core of NGC 6106 causing this confusion. In any case, it is a point source in my image and definitely a foreground star in our galaxy.

There are a lot of distant galaxies in the image out to 5 billion light-years and beyond. Two, if the redshift is correct, are the most distant individual galaxies I've imaged. One with a redshift of 1 which puts it at 7.78 billion light-years distant. But the real puzzler is north of it with a redshift of 2 and a distance of over 10 billion light-years. Further than any quasar in the image. I listed it with a question mark as I have a problem with my system seeing a galaxy at that distance, quasar yes. If it really is a galaxy then it is a humongous one. It is a bit diffuse in my image but that could mean it is a tight group of galaxies at that distance rather than one. I could pick up the combined light of a small cluster at that distance if the galaxies making it up are huge. NED labels this one as a verified spectroscopic redshift determination so I can't deny the distance. I'd love to know more about what that object is. NED identifies it as SDSS J161935.74+072831.3 if anyone wants to pursue this further.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6106

NGC6118

NGC 6118 is an SA(s)cd galaxy with some HII emission located in Serpens Caput about 4.2 degrees southeast of NGC 6070 in the previous post. Both are SAcd galaxies just that this one doesn't have the ring-like structure near its core. Also, the arms of NGC 6118 start at the core rather than from much further out in the disk as they do with NGC 6070. While only a bit over 4 degrees from NGC 6070 the area of this galaxy is very barren of background galaxies. Also, it is outside the area of the Sloan Survey as it has been picked up by NED. NGC 6118 is the only object in the field that NED had any redshift data for so I didn't prepare an annotated image. Only a half dozen other galaxies were even listed for this field all from the 2MASS and nearly all are very faint. This was taken a similar night as NGC 6070 so is also about 1.5 magnitudes dimmed by conditions which make the field seem even more barren than it really is.

Just off the image to the upper left is the B9V blue star HD 147550 at magnitude 6.32. It cast a nasty blue haze over the entire field thanks to all the haze in the air this night. I hope it didn't skew the color balance.

The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on April 14, 1785. It is part of the original Herschel 400 observing program by the Astronomical League. My visual observation of it on May 18, 1985, on a night of poor transparency due to high humidity reads: "Large, elongated, galaxy seen only by averted vision. By far the most difficult object to date. Just southwest of a 6th magnitude field star not plotted on my Tiron. Probably much easier on a better night without the glare of the star due to the humidity." So it seems conditions have hit me again with this galaxy.

In fact, I tried to image this one soon after starting my digital imaging career after building this observatory. That one came out very poor due to the red and blue severely hurt by haze turning the entire image somewhat green as back then I didn't know how to cure that. I tried reprocessing it but the red data was just too weak and the bad conditions made the glare from the B9V star far worse so adding the data wasn't of any help either. While it could benefit from yet another try, two is where I stop on this one. If it was in an interesting field then I might have considered it but with nothing but the galaxy, this will have to do.

Due to the poor transparency, I took 6 luminance frames rather than my normal 4 but I don't think it helped much if any. Still, this one is a big improvement over the first try in 2007.

This is the first of only 5 images June's lousy weather and short nights allowed me. Half of what last year's weather allowed.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6118

NGC6120

I found this rather busy field quite interesting as it has 3 NGC galaxies and a very flat galaxy as well as some other rather strange galaxies. I was going to center on NGC 6120 but when I did a test shot for how to frame it for the to-do list the field was so interesting I had to move the center position to where i could pick up as many of the interesting galaxies as possible. The field is located in northeastern Corona Borealis not far from the famous Hercules Galaxy Cluster.

NGC 6120, my initial object, is a peculiar spiral that could have made Arp's Atlas in any of several categories. It has a heavy arm as well as a tidal arm. Arp put tidal arms into many different categories for some reason. Besides the heavy blue arm, its other arm is oddly red and very different looking. On it is an odd elongated blue object NED identifies as SDSS J161947.71+374627.6. With no redshift, it is hard to tell if it is related to NGC 6120 or not. It might be the remaining core of something it is digesting or a super bright star-forming region or a separate galaxy (NED lists it as a galaxy) that is or isn't related to NGC 6120. I found nothing to help decide this issue. The tidal arm is composed of several overlapping star clouds of various sizes so quite different from most tidal features. It points to NGC 6119 which has its own odd pulled out or tidal arm which doesn't point back to NGC 6120. Otherwise, it is a rather normal looking spiral. Have these two interacted in the past? I'd expect more distortion in 6119 if they had but that doesn't mean they didn't interact. Both have similar redshifts that put them 420 million light-years distant. Ignoring its tidal plumes NGC 6120 is about 77,000 light-years across though nearly 130,000 light-years across including the plumes that go to the south as well as the north. NGC 6119 is about 100,000 light-years across including its pulled out arm. NGC 6120 was discovered by William Herschel on March 17, 1787 but is not in either Herschel observing program. NGC 6119 was discovered by John Herschel 40 years later on April 27, 1827. I found nothing on its odd pulled out arm.

The third NGC galaxy is NGC 6122. It is seen edge-on and appears to be a "red and dead" spiral though that may just be due to seeing it on edge. That assumes it is an Sb galaxy as NED classifies it. Other sources sometimes classify it as S0. Since I see a faint dust lane I don't agree with the S0 classification. Its redshift puts it slightly more distant at 460 million light-years. This, however, may be just due to random motion within the group and it is really part of the NGC 6120 group. There are other mostly smaller galaxies in the 400 to 460 million light-year range in the image suggesting this might be a rather large group though I found no group listed at NED. NGC 6122 was discovered by Guillaume Bigourdan on May 6, 1886. It seems odd to me that John Herschel missed it as it has a higher surface brightness than NGC 6119.

My other galaxy of interest is FGC 2024 well to the south. It is a very thin edge-on galaxy that certainly has earned is position in the Flat Galaxy Catalog. It is strange in a couple of respects. First, the disk is highly warped to the southwest and seems to have a kink in its northeastern arm right where another galaxy SPRC 266 hides it from view. Its other oddity is the core. Look closely and you see it is tilted somewhat more to the north-south than the disk, even more tilt than the bent end of the southwestern arm. Does SPRC 226 have something to do with some or all of these odd features? I have no idea. SPRC is the Sloan Polar Ring Catalog. However, I don't see how this applies to this little galaxy. Both have similar redshift that puts them 910 million light-year distant. That distance makes FGC 2024 a very large galaxy some 325,000 light-years across. That's huge for any galaxy, especially an Scd spiral.

Another large galaxy likely part of the same group as FGC 2024 is ASK 306395.0 which is an E0 galaxy of some 250,000 light-years in diameter. I find the E0 classification rather odd as it appears quite elongated in my data. Part of that may be due to a small galaxy seen on its northeastern side. Another large spiral is seen near the lower left edge of my image, ASK 306272.0. It is rather unusual for me to resolve spiral structure in a galaxy some 2.27 billion light-years distant. It's nearly 200,000 light-year size makes this possible.

There are several galaxy clusters listed. The largest is centered at the very bottom of my image a bit right of center. It is listed as being medium compact with 80 members across a 25 minute diameter field. That should extend more than halfway up into my image but I see only two other galaxies at its 1.9 billion light-year distance in the image. I don't know where the others are hiding. Maybe the rather numerous ones at about 1.76 to 1.78 billion light-years are members.

For a field of such distant galaxies, it turns out to be quite interesting, at least to me. Due to my poor conditions here I was able to only get one frame for each color but it seems to have worked out. While there was a piece of space junk in the red frame it didn't go through anything so was rather easy to clone out. Thus I didn't try for more color data.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=1x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6120

NGC6140

NGC 6140 is a spiral galaxy in Draco. Redshift puts it at 42 million light-years though non-redshift measurements range from 27 to 38 million light-years. It is a rather low surface brightness galaxy. This is a very early image when my processing was poor. I need to redo it. My processing hides the true difference between its brighter parts and the faint arms making the arms look much brighter than they really are. It was discovered by William Herschel on June 3, 1788. It isn't in either H400 program.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10' RG=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6140

NGC6155

NGC 6155 is a barred spiral galaxy in Hercules classified as SBcd. NED's redshift measurement puts it about 110 million light-years distant but non-redshift measurements say it is only 83 million light-years away. The bar is barely visible in my cropped image at 0.8" per pixel running from the southeast to the northwest. Apparently, it stands out better in near IR bands.

What drew my attention to this one is that it appears sloshed. That is the nucleus is well off center. It is well centered in the blue spiral arms of the galaxy but both are well east of the outer rather featureless reddish halo. Apparently, the halo is poor in new stars, though the highly fragmented arms are quite blue indicating good star formation is going on there. It almost looks like a small spiral superimposed over a low surface brightness elliptical.

The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on May 12, 1787 and is in the Herschel II program. He got the position a bit wrong. This was noted and corrected by Guillaume Bigourdan but the date or even the year is lost to history, at least I couldn't find it.

The field is devoid of companions for NGC 6155 but its appearance leads me to think it must have interacted, maybe devoured another galaxy at some time in its past.

Another galaxy that attracted my interest once I saw it in my processed image is ASK 115977.0 at a bit over 1 billion light-years. It is obviously a barred spiral with two faint, widely spaced arms coming off the ends of the bar. Most of the galaxies in the image are over one billion light-years distant though a bunch are also seen at about 760 million light-years. No asteroid came to the party, however.

When I went to process this one three months after it was taken, I discovered, somehow, I'd not taken any blue frames nor did I note this. I considered it done. With it fast fading into bad seeing low in the northwest and my trees over there I either had to wait until next year to get the data or take it with a bright, nearly full moon. I chose the latter. My background was 10x higher than normal so I used 4 frames to try and get a usable signal to noise ratio to balance the red and green frames. Actually, I took 8 but somehow I used the wrong coordinates at first and the galaxy was half out of the frame. So I had to retake them using the correct coordinates. By then the moon was higher and the galaxy lower so blue data is not what I wanted but rather than wait until next year I went with it anyway.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RG=2x10 B=4x10, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6155