NGC5992

KPG 471 is a pair of galaxies in eastern Bootes near the border with Hercules that lie about 430 to 440 million light-years from us. The two carry the NGC numbers of 5992 and 5993. NED has a note indicating they are non-interacting. Odd as both seem rather disturbed to my eye. Also, I think I see a faint star stream running between them in my image as well as in the Sloan image of this pair. So I'm going to say they are interacting. NGC 5992 to the south is listed as SBb with HII regions. They are obvious with three forming a tight arc to the east of the core and several more looking like a distorted spiral arm on the western side. While it looks highly disrupted, I found no mention of this. It is a Markarian blue galaxy being #489 in his list of galaxies with excess blue and UV light coming from their cores. While it was the core that was important most are quite blue everywhere and often they are rather disorganized so NGC 5992 would be a classic example of his class of galaxies. Including plumes, its east/west diameter is about 160,000 light-years though its north-south diameter, lacking plumes is 122,000 light-years. It was discovered by William Herschel on March 18, 1787.

NGC 5993, at first glance, appears to have a dual core. These are just stars though NED lists the northwestern one as a galaxy at about the same redshift as NGC 5933, ASK 245893.0. Even though it is round and starlike they give a 1.02'x.59' size. They get the magnitude of 14.4 correct. The other star is listed as a star. The real core is rather hard to see with these two bright stars but is closer to the northwestern star. It is classified as SB(r)b:. Including the long extended arm to the north and the brightest plume to the south, its diameter is 250,000 light-years. Without these, it is half this size. It was also discovered by William Herschel the same night as he saw NGC 5992, March 18, 1787. Neither are in either Herschel 400 observing list.

To the east of NGC 5993 is an object I've labeled [SP82] 52 which NED lists as a blue compact galaxy but an essential note says "May be an outlying HII region or companion to NGC 5993." It seems to have some faint star clouds around it, especially to the west. So I vote that it is a blue compact galaxy. It may have been somewhat disrupted by NGC 5993 and or NGC 5992.

In the lower left is an object that is somewhat elongated, certainly not starlike that is listed in NED as SDSS J154551.14+405641.1 a quasar and as [VCV2006] J154551.2+405640, a galaxy. Usually, a quasar so outshines the host galaxy the galaxy isn't seen. They do list this as a candidate BLAGN (Broad Line AGN). Most quasars are broad line AGNs. But if it is one why is it so dim? It is closer to us than nearly all known quasars. So it may be a dying quasar. None seem to exist in our present universe. It's only when we look back in time they become common, They seem to have all died out by about 2 billion years ago though one is known at only a half billion light-years it is a very weak one in which the host galaxy is easily seen. It may be this one is running out of its food supply needed to keep up the output of a quasar.

Like most nights this fall and winter this wasn't a very good night. It started good and I took that opportunity to get luminance data but by the end of that period, the skies were going south. So much so I had to throw out the color data. I retook that a few nights later but conditions weren't much if any better. I forced these to work but consider the color balance as being rather questionable.

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

Related Designations for NGC5992

NGC6001

NGC 6001 is a face on spiral galaxy in Corona Borealis about 450 million light-years distant. To show this much detail at that distance it has to be a large galaxy. I measure it at a bit over 140,000 light-years across. It made my list as it fit into Arp's category for spirals with one heavy arm. While my nonlinear stretch sort of evens things out that arm is really much brighter than the rest of the disk. It has one other main arm that is much fainter plus a similarly bright spur that comes off the heavy arm making it appear much like a three-arm galaxy. Though the faint main arm has its own spur it is much fainter than the spur off the "heavy" arm. NED and the NGC Project classifies it as Sc while Seligman says Sc?

The galaxy seems to anchor its own "local group" of galaxies, all much smaller than it is. PGC 056051, sometimes called NGC 6002, being the nearest. If you scan the distances in the annotated image you'll find others at the distance scattered about the field. NGC 6001 was discovered by William Herschel on April 11, 1785. It didn't make either of the Herschel 400 observing programs.

This brings us to NGC 6002. Something was discovered by Lawrence Parsons on April 20, 1873. While sometimes identified as PGC 056051 that galaxy was likely too faint for even his 72" speculum mirror. There is nothing at his position southeast of NGC 6001. He was making a consistent 1-minute error that would move his position to south of NGC 6001 where again there's nothing. Thus some are tempted to identify it with the PGC galaxy to the southwest. His errors just can't make that work and that galaxy is fainter than anything he saw with the 72" speculum mirror. Though SIMBAD insists it is PGC 56051 many others disagree for the above reasons. What is within range and not far from his corrected position is the star I've marked in the annotated image. The Sky shows it to be a double star and does identify it as NGC 6002. NED says it is a star, making no mention it is double. Looking at the Sloan image I see no sign it is double either. Nor does its PSF in my image give any indication it is double. So I assume this is yet another problem with this object. PGC 056051 is classified as Sb? by Seligman.

Transparency was better than much of May but still below what used to pass for normal. There are some interesting background galaxies that appear to be interacting but they are too faint for me to bring out, unfortunately. Maybe if I ever retake this field I can catch them. I doubt that will happen, however. This is another taken near dawn without time for a second green frame. I saved green to last expecting dawn to be a problem. Fortunately, there are rather easy ways of compensating for weak or noisy green data so I never went back for a second green. One was sufficient.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RB=2x10' G=1x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6001

NGC6004

NGC 6003 and 6004 are a pair of galaxies in Serpens Caput about 180 million light-years away by cosmological redshift. NGC 6003 is a rather dull, featureless compact S0-like galaxy. NGC 6004 is the interesting barred spiral galaxy. The two arms coming off the bar are very different. The one off the southern bar is quite normal looking starting right at the end of the bar and making a nice neat spiral out to the edge of the galaxy. The northern bar makes a sudden faint jog east to connect to the end of that spiral arm. The arm is more a collection of bright spots that quickly fades away into an amorphous blob part of which takes a jog west to almost connect to the far end of the southern arm. Arm segments are scattered about as well. Both galaxies were discovered by Édouard Stephan but on different nights. NGC 6003 was seen on June 19, 1879 while NGC 6004 was seen 5 days earlier on June 14, 1879. Being only about 15 minutes of arc apart his field of view must have been rather small.

Besides the normal assortment of background objects, galaxies, galaxy clusters and an asteroid there are two objects for which the data at NED seems to have been collected by that all too common astronomer Sum Ting Wong.

LEDA 4545108 is a rather amorphous looking galaxy to the west of NGC 6004. NED gives it a redshift of z=1.07681 which puts it some 8 billion light-years distant light travel time and some 824,000 light-years across using its apparent size distance of 5.54 billion light-years. No way this can be correct. NED also has an essential note on it saying one source puts the redshift at z=0.01299 which puts it only 177 million light-years distant and 26,000 light-years in size. Thus a dwarf companion of NGC 6003 and NGC 6004. Why NED gives the obviously wrong data the front and center position I don't know.

Then there's the similar case of ASK 560736.0 at the bottom left of my image. Again it has a redshift way out of line at z=1.532680. This puts its look back time at 9.5 billion years and a size using the angular size distance of 5.8 billion light-years of 842,000 light-years. Now that's one big edge on galaxy. Again an "essential note" gives a redshift of z=0.05267 for a distance of about 690,000 light-years and a size of 100,000 light-years. Again a far more reasonable result.

Between this last galaxy and NGC 6004 is another amorphous blob of a galaxy. NED lists it only as an ultraviolet source which it uses for some hot stars, quasars, and blue galaxies. Ned makes no determination of what the source is and provides little data. Blue objects like this often don't make it into NED from the Sloan data. Why this is I've not been able to find out. I've asked both NED and Sloan but never gotten a reply. I have several pro astronomers I've asked that study galaxies who have not a clue either.

May was a poor month for imaging with a lot of data lost to clouds. This is my last May object. June is difficult since it isn't dark very long. I usually need more than one night to catch an object. Still, it appears to have been a better month than May. Though I may find a lot of the data isn't usable when I go to process it. Guess we'll find out together how much is usable.

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

Related Designations for NGC6004

NGC6007

NGC 6007 is a rather strange looking spiral in Serpens Caput about 480 million light-years distant. The arm structure is quite unique, far from a classic grand design spiral. First off it is huge for a spiral at nearly 220,000 light-years in size. One main arm comes off the north side the core then makes a sudden turn around the core, goes straight for a bit then curves away getting broader and brighter as it goes. It's not obvious any other arm comes off the core. The only other "major" arm runs in a straight line above the core until it passes a field star with with another field star of similar brightness below it. The arm seems to know of these and hooks neatly around them ending just beyond the lower star. While the straight portion holds its brightness as it reaches the field star it fades away. Several other much shorter arm segments are seen including on that seems to come off the west end of this upper arm and which pretty much follows the same path, just further out though it has a curve rather than being straight. As it goes south it appears full of star knots that give it a someone kinky appearance bending first this way then that way. How did this huge galaxy get this way? I suppose it is due to interaction with other galaxies in the group, some of which it may be still digesting. There are many other galaxies at the same redshift in the field that appear as dwarfs by comparison but actually are rather large. NGC 6007 was discovered by Albert Marth on June 2, 1864, the same night as he found NGC 6006 and 6009 discussed below.

NGC 6006 is a rather strange galaxy, The NGC Project classifies it as E while Seligman classifies it as E3. NED says the rather cryptic "pair" which I included in the annotated image though I have no idea what this means. No one else sees two galaxies here, maybe NED doesn't either. I just don't know. If an elliptical it has plumes. Could this be due to interaction with NGC 6007 and help explain its odd arm structure. While it appears small it is actually a respectable 80,000 light-years across.

NGC 6009 is the other NGC galaxy in the field. NED doesn't attempt to classify it while The NGC Project and Seligman say simply S without further classification. Its upper arm does pull away from the disk slightly but otherwise, it is a rather basic spiral. I thought I saw hints of a bar but that may just be noise in my image. It is slightly larger of the little NGC galaxies at about 90,000 light-years in size, nearly as big as our galaxy. For some reason, a single Tully-Fisher distance estimate has it at nearly 160% the redshift distance. That would make it huge which seems unlikely so I'm going with the redshift distance.

Near the top of the image left of center is ASK 635335.0, another member of the group. NED shows the slightly blue object in the disk as a distant quasar seen through the disk of the galaxy. Since it is a spectroscopic redshift measurement that puts it over 10 billion light-years distant I'll have to say it is most likely the case but it sure looks like a blue star cloud in the galaxy to me. How bright is it to shine through the dust and gas of the galaxy?

To the east of it is PGC 056336 an SB(s)b? pec starburst galaxy with two wide arms. NED shows the bright parts of the north and south arms as separate galaxies, not as part of the galaxy as they seem to be. I didn't label them as the redshifts were virtually the same as for PGC 056336.

Below PGC 056336 near the bottom is another very wide two armed spiral. It appears to have a bright object on the end of a drawn-out east arm. Unfortunately, I'd had a camera problem before starting this image and had to dismount the camera then remount it. In doing so I failed to get it on square and didn't notice so this side of the frame is out of focus. Looking at the Sloan image of this object it is very blue and highly distorted as it whatever it was has been disrupted. Thus it may be the cause of the arm's length and drawn out shape. I'll need to retake this one with the camera square this time.

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

Related Designations for NGC6007

NGC6012

NGC 6012 is a very weird looking barred spiral in Serpens Caput about 90 million light-years distant. The NGC project classifies it as SBa while NED using a more complex classification system says (R)SB(r)ab: LINER: They indicate it may have a LINER core which could mean a somewhat active feeding black hole at its core though it may be due to white dwarfs in the galaxy. Note the colons are about the equivalent of question marks so there's some question about this. Assuming the 90 million light-year distance is correct it is about 85 thousand light years across. A respectable size for a barred spiral.

What drew my attention to it is the odd bright ring-like structure that appears could be a round ring seen foreshortened but since the galaxy is obviously seen nearly face on that would seem unlikely. The papers I found indicate the "ring" is caused by the bar (otherwise nearly invisible at visual wavelengths) which is outlined by bright stars creating the ring effect. These say the bar is well seen in K band IR images though I couldn't find any online. The DSS IR image shows some hint of the bar. I know of no other galaxy with a bright star outlined bar. I would have thought its appearance strange enough for Arp's atlas under his miscellaneous category but apparently, it didn't make the cut. NGC 6012 was discovered by William Herschel on March 19, 1787. It isn't in either H400 program.

While NED shows thousands of background galaxies none in my frame have redshift data but for NGC 6012. Therefore I haven't bothered with an annotated image.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10' RGB=2x10' (color and two luminance images taken a month later due to clouds with blue hurt by dawn and a bright moon), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6012

NGC6015

I've heard of a cometary nebula, and have some on my to-do list in fact, but I've never heard of the term "cometary galaxy". If there is such a thing it is in this image. There is a very distant galaxy found by the HST that is now called the "Comet Galaxy" (http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0705a/ in the upper left corner) but it is a far poorer "comet" than the one in this image. More on it in a bit. First some on the rest of the image.

NGC 6015 is a multi-armed, warped spiral galaxy in Draco, south of the bowl of the Little Dipper. Its distance is hard to pin down. Too close for redshift to be reliable other methods need be used. Tully-Fisher measurements range from about 50 million light-years to 66 million light-years though most cluster toward the lower estimate, say 55 million light-years. Oddly the highest and lowest measurements have the smallest error bar yet neither include the other. They are just too far apart. It was discovered by William Herschel on June 2, 1788. It is in the second Herschel 400 program.

Papers on this galaxy are also somewhat in disagreement, one finding a strong ring structure and another saying they couldn't find one. Though that one looked at CO radio frequencies while the one finding a ring used a wider range of frequencies. That paper goes into a lot of detail on this galaxy. It's abstract is at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1997A%26A...321..754V with a link to the free full article. The galaxy has no obvious central bulge.

The smudge of a galaxy off the eastern edge of the galaxy is SDSS J155136.52+621728.6. NED has no redshift data for it. I'd think it likely related to NGC 6015 but that is only a guess until more is known about it.

To the east of NGC 6015 is a very odd galaxy. It looks just like a comet! Since it shows up on the POSS plates dating back to the 1950's it is one slow comet! I would love to tell you about it. NED says it doesn't exist! It shows nothing at the position. NED does show the reddish spherical galaxy above it as the IR source 2MASXi J1552150+621928/SDSS J155215.07+621927.8. Between the IR galaxy and the comet-like one, NED shows a 23rd magnitude point source galaxy which on the Sloan plate shows up as a bright green hot pixel but they show nothing for the position of the comet-like galaxy. Did they fall for it being a comet? I can't fathom any other reason for leaving it out. The Sky 6 shows it as PGC 2634580 and 17.8 magnitude. In case it was a nebula in our galaxy I checked SIMBAD but it too has nothing at that location either. I found a 2007 post on a Yahoo forum saying SIMBAD did give it the same PGC designation as The Sky 6, however, I couldn't get SIMBAD to do so today. Maybe I don't hold my tongue right.

While this field is covered by the Sloan survey and NED shows at least 3000 galaxies in the field only NGC 6015 has any redshift data. Since I went with a non-redshift distance estimate I put it in parentheses. The image is full of interesting galaxy groups and clusters. Some of these did have redshift data. I was half done with the annotated image when I realized I wasn't picking up any galaxies. So I finished it, skimpy as it is.

May 2011 was a very poor month. This is my last May object. So I'm now only 13.5 months behind!

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

Related Designations for NGC6015

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