NGC2346

NGC 2346 is a rather famous planetary nebula in Monoceros near Delta and not far from the more famous, far larger, Rosette Nebula. Though the latter is a huge star birth region, NGC 2346 is a tiny star death region being a pair of stars, one of which is dying, thus creating a bipolar planetary Nebula about 2000 light years away. The Hubble Space Telescope took a famous image of this one. It has a good discussion about it so to save my typing fingers I'll just refer you to the Hubble page on it. Note their image is false color while I tried to preserve colors as the eye would see them if it was bright enough to activate our color vision.
http://hubblesite.org/image/906/news_release/1999-35

The Nebula was discovered by William Herschel on March 5, 1790. It is in the second H400 observing program.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC2346

NGC2347

NGC 2347 is a face on spiral galaxy in southeastern Camelopardalis about 200 million light-years distant. It has a bright central region and arms that are rather red. It has a slightly blue middle region of arms and an out disk that is somewhat bluer with little arm structure though it has a few star clouds apparently randomly distributed in it. The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on November 1, 1788. It is in the second Herschel 400 observing program. This is what put it on my to-do list.

It has an apparent companion galaxy to the north, IC 2179. It has a similar redshift. Being an elliptical galaxy it has little structure. It was discovered over 100 years later by Buillaume Bigourdan on February 24, 1894. No other galaxy has redshift data at NED. In fact very few galaxies are to be found in the field that NED has data for. All it knows about at all are listed in the annotated image. Several galaxies are obvious but not at NED. The one I found most interesting but it wasn't in NED or SIMBAD is the faint smudge west of IC 2347. The label in the annotated image covers it up since I couldn't identify it anyway.

Toward the top and a bit left is an apparent galaxy that at first made me think it was an asteroid trail as seen on a very bad night as was the case for this my image of NGC 2251. But no asteroid is listed there and my notes indicate this was a very good night so it must be a galaxy, just not one that made any catalog NED or SIMBAD carries. Nor was the one to its lower left. Many more are seen in the image bu aren't at NED. The field is just too close to the Zone of Avoidance for many surveys to look at it. The only one that covers faint galaxies that is in NED for this area is the 2MASS catalog of 2 micron IR bright galaxies. Most that are not in NED likely have too little IR emission to make the 2MASS catalog.

Being at nearly 65 degrees north declination no asteroids were seen in the image. Only a very few get this far north so their absence is not unexpected.

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

Related Designations for NGC2347

NGC2353

NGC 2353 is a type II2p open star cluster in southern Monoceros just north of Canis Major. WEBDA puts it at a distance of 3650 light-years and an age of 95 million years. They show it as little reddened. Then I went to Hipparcos data in The Sky. That shows the bright star to the lower right as being 2434 light-years distant. They show it as a 6th magnitude B0III star so a giant star. The two stars above and left of it they show as being only 350 and 400 light-years distant. The only other star I found in the data was the blue star to the top edge of the cluster is at 4250 light years and a B8V star. None agree to the WEBDA distance. Is the cluster the remaining blue stars?

The cluster was discovered by William Herschel on January 10, 1785. It is in the original H400 observing program. My log from March 16, 1985 with my 10" f/5 on an average night reads "Huge, scattered cluster between two bright stars. Some hint of unresolved background stars." Doesn't sound like it impressed me. I only took this one since it was in the Herschel program and visible from my latitude though getting near my lower limit.

Two very faint galaxies are in the image. With no distance or magnitude data, I didn't annotate them.

I took only one 10 minute frame for each color when no satellites were in the frames. I've reduced from my normal 1" per pixel to 1.5" per pixel as the added resolution isn't needed.

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

Related Designations for NGC2353

NGC2357

NGC 2357/FGC 0619 is a large flat galaxy in central Gemini seen nearly edge on. Its distance is about 110 million light-years both by redshift and the median of 18 mostly Tully Fisher based measurements. Assuming that distance it is about 115,000 light-years across. The disk appears warped but that may be an illusion seeing its two widely separated arms at a very slight angle. I can't make up my mind. Both NED and the NGC project have decided it is an Sc galaxy.

The galaxy was discovered in 1885 by Jean-Marie Édouard Stephan (also written Édouard Jean-Marie Stephan) using a 31.5" reflector on February 6, 1885. You may know him better from another discovery of his, Stephan's Quintet. He was director of Marseille Observatory from 1872 to 1907.

NGC 2357 is a rather lonely galaxy. There are two nearby in my image but unfortunately, nothing in the image but NGC 2357 has any distance data. I don't know if either is a related dwarf galaxy or not. I doubt the red one is but the blue one might be. The red one is 2MASX J07175533+231825. The blue one isn't in NED as the only catalog they include for this area is the IR 2MASS. Unless a blue galaxy has starburst or near starburst activity it rarely has enough IR to make that catalog. Since nothing but a handful of small in angular size 2MASS galaxies are even noted in NED I didn't bother to make an annotated image.

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

Related Designations for NGC2357

NGC2359

Thor's Helmet is NGC 2359. Though being in Minnesota I guess I should call it Viking's Helmet. Though Viking helmets had no horns contrary to cartoons. Seeing was poor again making for odd shaped stars but transparency was very high so the shot goes quite deep. I used 10 5 minute shots for the luminosity image and my usual 3 5 minute shots for the color. This is a bubble blown by a Wolf Reyet star. That's the brightest one in the bubble, a bit right and up from its center. The gases released by the star are interacting with a large nearby molecular cloud resulting in a red shock front where the energy of the collision is highest. Again, distance is uncertain but most feel it is somewhere around 15,000 light years away. A long distance to see through the dust and gunk of our galaxy. If the distance is right then the bubble is about 30 light-years across. Rather large for a Wolf Reyet bubble. It was discovered by William Herschel on January 31, 1785. It is in the second H400 observing program. There's a lot of info on this guy on the net. A Kitt Peak shot of the center along with info on this guy is at:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021205.html

Unfortunately, this is a very early image before I knew much about image processing or how to control read noise of the camera. Being below 13 degrees south it is usually caught in bad seeing. It's been on my reshoot list but so far seeing hasn't cooperated in over 10 years.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=10x5' RGB=3x5', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC2359

NGC2366

NGC 2366 is a dwarf galaxy in the M81 group. While it is a strange galaxy it isn't strange enough to make Arp's list. It is located in the constellation of Camelopardalis. That might sound like it is a camel but it is a giraffe and a rather faint one at that. This is a pair of galaxies. The tiny one is NGC 2363. Both are about 10 million light-years away so in our backyard. Massive star formation is going on in both galaxies. Two huge star clusters have formed in the star-forming region of NGC 2366. In fact, this is the original NGC 2366 as William Herschel described it when he found it on December 3, 1788. Though he did mention the rest of the galaxy all he meant as his find was this region. Only later did the name come to be applied to the entire galaxy. Their blue light completely overwhelmed my filters so the red color of the ionized hydrogen is pretty well lost though small regions in other areas of the galaxy are very obvious. I had better luck with the companion where the star cluster didn't saturate my system. Note the HII region ends with a shock wave at the northeast (upper left) end of the pink nebula. This likely is created by the light pressure of the super hot blue stars in the cluster. Whether this is really a separate galaxy or just part of NGC 2366 seems unknown as yet. Many years ago Hubble took a great shot of the star-forming regions that are so blown out in my image. Learn more about this at:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/31/image/a/

NGC 2363 was discovered by Ralph Copeland on March 9, 1874. He mentions the star-forming region Herschel found and references that region as NGC 2366 so by 1874 the name hadn't yet been applied to the entire galaxy. Note too that NGC 2366 lies within the blue halo of NGC 2366. It even appears to expand to include it though it is possible this is a coincidence and NGC 2366 lies either in front or behind the halo. Still, it may have caused it if a separate galaxy passing by.

The obvious galaxy in NGC 2366 above the star-forming region is 2MASX J07284539+6912186 but I couldn't find anything on it. Though it likely resides hundreds of millions of light years beyond NGC 2366. There are dozens of anonymous even more distant galaxies in the image.

This is an early image of mine when I didn't know how to control stars and prevent blowing them as well as the HII region of NGC 2366 from blowing out and saturating. Nor did I know how to combine Halpha data in a galaxy image. Another for the retake list that may not happen.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10 HA=1x30 (too little) RGB=2x10x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC2366

NGC2371

NGC 2371-NGC2372 is a planetary nebula in Gemini. William Herschel found it twice in one night not realizing it the second time. Nor did Dreyer notice it when assembling his catalog so the two entries for the same object stuck. Herschel made his double discovery on March 12, 1785. It is in the original H400 program. My entry with my 10" f/5 at up to 300 power on March 16, 1985 under good transparency but lousy seeing reads: "Two bright puffs that seem brighter in the centers of each. Tonight the seeing is poor and it appears like two objects. On better nights it appears to be a single object and I even wondered how anyone could think it two. Tonight it is just the opposite. Steady seeing is crucial for this object."

While seeing wasn't really bad for this one it wasn't all that good. Then I screwed up the processing of the images when I used the wrong dark file on them. It wiped out the very faint details, mostly at the edges of the frame so didn't hurt the nebula much but did wipe out some interesting galaxies. I didn't have the right dark so started to take some. Had a setting wrong so deleted the darks and redid them. One problem, I deleted the light frames, not the bad darks. The new darks overwrote the deleted files so I couldn't recover them. OOPS. So I had to go with the poorly processed light frames. Least I didn't delete the processed frames, only the original ones. I wish the software would force them to read only status so you can't make that mistake. (Edit: Now I do exactly that and never processess anything on the imaging computer. All files are copied to another computer for processing -- I learned my lesson the hard way.) Anyway, I had to crop the edges of this one to remove the screwed up parts and lost several dozen background galaxies. Bad seeing (Edit: And my ham-handed processing) causes the irregular halos around the brighter stars and especially the central white dwarf that created the nebula. I can't find a consensus on its distance. Say 3900 light years.

This was an early image of mine when I didn't understand proper imaging technique nor how to process images so stars didn't dominate. In fact, I did it all wrong both in processing, some of which is noted above, and in taking the data. I need to redo this one on a good night. While I used over twice as much luminance data as I normally take it doesn't begin to go as deep as I do now with half the data due to all the mistakes I made. But it is, so far, the only image of this one I've taken so will have to do.

I haven't tried to identify the galaxy cluster in the lower left corner of the image. It is a rather rich cluster. (Edit: I didn't try to research an image as I do today.)

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=3x30' RGB=3x5', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC2371

NGC2385

The field is centered on NGC 2385, a Sb galaxy per NED and S? per the NGC project. The galaxy is about 200 million light-years distant in the constellation of Gemini. It has a nice find dust lane showing we are seeing it virtually edge on. There's a rather large halo of stars around it.

My real interest lies with NGC 2388 to its east and down slightly. It is a Luminous InfraRed Galaxy (LIRG) with a rather odd structure. Dust lanes are unusually red. The entire galaxy appears reddened by all the dust it has. NED classes it as S? while the NGC project says simply S. It too is about 200 million light-years away.

The very blue galaxy above it is NGC 2389. It has a rather complex arm structure that appears to come off the ends of a bar. But the NGC project classes it as Sc. NED does better saying SAB(rs)c. Both it and NGC 2388 have HII emission lines. Redshift puts it about 190 million light years distant. The difference from its companions is likely due to relative motion about their groups center of gravity rather than a real distance difference. In fact, Tully-Fisher measurements put it a bit over 200 million light-years away. Such measurements aren't available on the other two.

None of these three galaxies appear to be interacting though all seem disturbed in some way: Large faint halo of stars for 2385, Unusually heavy dust for 2388 and very complex, ill-defined arm structure for 2389.

Visual astronomy created the NGC catalog. This resulted in mistaken identity as visual observers would sometimes think they saw faint glows around stars that were more likely due to high haze, poor seeing or both. We have several examples in this image. NGC 2386 is a triple star while NGC 2390 and NGC 2391 are just single stars. So this NGC group contains three real galaxies and three mistakes. The group is cataloged as WBL 142 though often referred to as the NGC 2389 group being named for its brightest member.

Another designation for the group is HDCE 0444. This includes KUG 0724+341 at the very top of my image a west (right) of the other three. It is a very blue galaxy NED classifies as "Spiral". Its redshift puts it at 220 million light-years with no other measurements given. So it appears to be a true member of the group, just on the outskirts as we see it from our perspective.

To the lower right is another pair of galaxies. NGC 2379, an SA0 galaxy as NED sees it or S0 as the NGC project classes it. It is about 190 million light-years distant. So it is likely related to the others to its northeast but isn't officially a member of the group. In fact, it and the nearby spiral are considered part of the WBL 141 group even though the spiral has a very different redshift. The spiral is NGC 2375, classed as SB(s)b and SBb by the NGC project, has a redshift that puts it about 360 million light years distant. Nearly twice the distance to the others in the field. It has a small, high surface brightness companion on its arm. Arp had many such galaxies in his atlas, many so distant little detail was visible. Did he miss this one or omit it for some reason.

In many cases in Arp's atlas, the companion had no redshift measurement so it was impossible to verify it was a true companion and really was on or near the arm. This is no exception, unfortunately. In fact, the companion isn't even listed in NED! It could almost pass as a star in my image but the PSF is very wrong for a star and quite right for a galaxy when you look at the raw data. It is clearly a galaxy in the Sloan image as well. Yet NED never picked it up from the survey.

Another double star in the area was mistaken for a fuzzy object by visual observers and has the designation NGC 2378. Its discoverer was none other than Édouard Stephan of Stephan's Quintet fame. He didn't do so well with this observation. His description: "Two stars, very faint and very close which, occasionally seem to be enveloped in a nearly imperceptible nebulosity."

The galaxy in the lower left corner is the edge on spiral FGC 0633/UGC 03879, classed as Sbc. Its redshift puts it about 230 million light years distant. Again likely part of the NGC 2389 group. Of the galaxies in the image with redshift data all but NGC 2375 appear to be part of a common group. Several other galaxies are seen at its western end but none are in NED. Even though the Sloan survey covered this field it, or maybe NED, picked up only some of the galaxies. I don't know why.

No other object in the image has redshift data. Though there are three asteroids.
(80481) 2000 AJ33 Mag 18.2
(155472) 1998 SY98 Mag 19.9
(223904) 2004 VK56 Mag 19.6

Conditions were rather poor for this image. Note the gaps in the asteroid trails where clouds pretty much blocked everything twice for a couple minutes. Still it came out better than my first try.

NGC 2375 was discovered by George Stoney on February 20, 1849.
NGC 2378 was discovered by Édouard Stephan on February 8, 1878.
NGC 2379 was discovered by John Herschel on March 6, 1828.
NGC 2385 and NGC 2388 was dicovered by William Herschel on February 4, 1793.
NGC 2386 was discovered by Lawrence Parsons on January 1, 1876 Could a hangover from New Years Eve explain his mistaking stars for a galaxy?
NGC 2389 was discovered by William Herschel on February 5, 1788.
NGC 2390 and 2391 were mistaken for galaxies by Robbert Ball on December 10, 1866.

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

Related Designations for NGC2385

NGC2392

NGC 2392 is commonly known as "The Eskimo Nebula" as visually it seems to resemble a face buried in a fuzzy parka hood. This image is taken and displayed at 0.5" per pixel rather than my normal 1" per pixel. This image was taken on a night of the best seeing I've had here since building the observatory or since. It was at least twice as good as I normally get. I further improved it using L-R deconvolution. This is the process developed when Hubble turned up with a bad mirror. If all the errors are due to the same thing (a misfigured mirror in Hubble's case) then it is possible to put that out of focus fuzz back where it belonged. It is a long and slow process when done correctly. Normally seeing errors are very random so this process doesn't work well. But when seeing is very good then it can make things even better as it has in this case. It took about 30 minutes doing over 1 billion calculations a second to accomplish this feat. I normally don't have conditions that allow this processing but it worked in this case.

It was discovered by William Herschel on January 17, 1787. It is in the original H400 program. My visual comments from that on March 16, 1985 with my 10" f/5 at up to 300x on a below average night reads: "Small two shelled planetary with a bright central star. Long one of my favorites. Like most planetaries, it holds up well under high power. Turbulent seeing limited power tonight." It is in eastern Gemini. Distance estimates vary a bit but most are around 2,900 to 3,000 light-years.

Being bright I used only 6 two minute exposures for the detail and 3 two minute ones for each color. All were taken at 0.5" at a time I was normally binning most images 2x2. The data was taken on October 29, 2006. I could take color data back then but had no idea how to process it at the time. So this one wasn't processed until a year later.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x2'x1 RGB=3x2'x1, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC2392

NGC2415

NGC 2415 is a strange galaxy in Gemini or is it Lynx? Some sources say Lynx while others say Gemini. The Sky puts it about 50 seconds of arc south of Lynx and thus in Gemini. In any case, it is about 180 million light-years distant by redshift. Many sources classify it as a questionable Magellanic irregular galaxy but it certainly has well defined, if peculiar, spiral arms. Several notes at NED say it is a double galaxy showing no tidal effects. I don't know if they mean two galaxies in the same line of site or it is a merger of two. I have trouble seeing either but it is very bright and in many images, including mine, seems to have two cores. The one to the right is actually a star cloud when seen at a higher resolution than I had this rather poor night.

It was discovered by William Herschel on March 10, 1790. When son John recorded it (date unknown) he described it as "pretty bright, considerably small, round, very gradually very slightly brighter middle, mottled but not resolved, almost planetary nebular". In many images, much of it is burned in much like planetary nebulae often are in survey images. It is in the second H400 program but my log is lost and I left no other notes on it. My memory doesn't go back to the 1980's all that well.

Turns out the tower of babble got me again. I'd already picked this one up back in 2009 when imaging Arp 250. That is the odd double galaxy to the upper right. I carried it originally in my 09-04-09 update. That image can be seen at http://www.mantrapskies.com/image-archive/ARP_GALAXIES/ARP250/ARP250L4X10RGB2X10X3R.JPG. It was taken during my "blue period" when I didn't do G2V color balancing right and everything came out too blue. Conditions for it were a bit better so it goes a bit deeper with better contrast as I was imaging through high clouds for this image.

The field is not well studied for galaxies being in the Zone of Avoidance but some galaxies had redshift data. I've listed all in the annotated image even those without redshift data as there aren't that many to cover.

I find several smaller galaxies that are likely dwarf companions to NGC 2415 as they too have a similar redshift. Though the one right beside it had no redshift and the faint smudge below it wasn't to be found in NED or SIMBAD. It's likely in some catalog somewhere but with thousands to search through I didn't look further. Oddly NED says the spiral east of Arp 250 is Arp 250 and gives other designations for the real Arp 250. SIMBAD identifies this false Arp 250 as LEDA 2063674 but has no redshift or other distance data. The real Arp 250 is in his category for "appearance of Fission" and does look a lot like mitosis in progress but really is two colliding dwarf galaxies only 70 million light-years distant.

I measure NGC 2415 at about 50 million light-years in size. Not all that big of a spiral. Arp 250 is only 14,000 light-years across with each being half that size. Dwarf galaxies indeed.

NED shows the galaxy cluster Abell 0590 on the east side of the image. It is near but not centered on an obvious galaxy cluster to the northwest. I found no galaxy count for this group but Abell 590 is listed as richness class 1 which means it has about 50 to 70 galaxies in it that fit in brightness between the third brightest member and the one 2 magnitudes fainter. It has no distance measurement but is listed as distant class 6 which means that most of the galaxies are magnitude 17.3 to 18. Most in the group to the NE are fainter so where are the galaxies in this cluster. I put the label where its core is. No diameter was given but it was described as being compact. That fits the group to the northwest but nothing much is seen at its position.

The brightest member of the group to the NW is interesting. NED classifies it in some catalogs as a quasar and others as a galaxy. Considering its red color and that it has a physical size I vote for galaxy. Most say it is an HBLLAC galaxy. That stands for high energy BL Lac galaxy. This is what Wikipedia says about BL Lac objects.

"A BL Lacertae object or BL Lac object is a type of galaxy with an active galactic nucleus (AGN), named after its prototype, BL Lacertae. In contrast to other types of active galactic nuclei, BL Lacs are characterized by rapid and large-amplitude flux variability and significant optical polarization.[1] Because of these properties, the prototype of the class (BL Lac) was originally thought to be a variable star. When compared to the more luminous active nuclei (quasars) with strong emission lines, BL Lac objects have spectra dominated by a relatively featureless non-thermal emission continuum over the entire electromagnetic range.[2] This lack of spectral lines historically hindered BL Lac's identification of their nature and proved to be a hurdle in the determination of their distance."

Those with an unusually high energy cutoff have the leading H, those with a low energy cut off have an L prefix. Other prefixes are found but these seem to be the ones that are in current use. Read more about this at https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Urry1/UrryP6_2_6.html

Four asteroids are visible in the image, well one is really faint thanks to the clouds I had to image through. Details on them are in the annotated image. Magnitudes are estimates by the Minor Planet Center. A fifth one should have been in the image but it was labeled as needing positional data and I found no trace of it though it should have been visible if the magnitude was reasonably correct.

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

Related Designations for NGC2415