NGC6811

NGC 6811 is an open cluster, type IV3p, in Cygnus. WEBDA puts its distance as 1,215 parsecs (~ 4,000 light-years) and estimates its age as about 630 million years. Other sources (http://cdsbib.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/cdsbib?2013AJ....145....7J) put its age at about 1 billion years and distance at 3600 light-years. Dreyer's NGC description says it is large, pretty rich, little condensed with stars ranging from 11 to 14 magnitude. Its diameter is listed at 15 minutes which isn't all that large. Those I'd consider large won't fit into my field of view. It is one of four open clusters that are within Kepler's planetary search field of view. I find a lot of papers looking at the variability of its red giants but didn't find any mention of possible planets being found. The cluster was discovered by John Herschel on August 29, 1829

This is another object I left no notes about why it was on the to-do list. It went on before Kepler was running so don't think that was it. Not a great target for my system. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn't a typo but don't know what was meant if it was. Anyway since I had the data I processed it.

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

Related Designations for NGC6811

NGC6813

NGC 6813 is a small nebula in northwestern Vulpecula about 2.25 degrees southeast of Albireo at the head of Cygnus the Swan. That puts it well into the Milky Way. Even after greatly reducing the stars it is still somewhat lost among the stars. I find very little on this little guy. Also, I failed to note how it got onto my to-do list. I must have had a reason but apparently, I never wrote it down and now I have no idea why I have an image of it.

It isn't a Herschel 400 object as it was one he missed. It was discovered on August 7, 1867 by Albert Marth. While cataloged as an emission nebula some places, Simbad calls it "Interstellar matter". It doesn't have the pink color typical of emission nebula due to the ionized hydrogen and oxygen lines they emit. It does, however, appear to be the birth ground of new stars as it hides a star cluster seen only in infrared light. I found only one amateur color image and that one shows it typical H alpha pink but that's not what I got. Also if you combine the red and blue POSS plates using pseudo green it comes out orange. My red frames were severely hit by fog. I had to boost them by about 5 times the normal adjustment needed at this altitude. If that wasn't enough that could be why I'm not getting typical H alpha color but for the fainter outer parts. I balanced based on the spectral class of the brighter stars in the image or their B-V values. The brighter stars seemed more red challenged than the dimmer stars for some reason. Since the nebula covers a wide brightness range its color is rather suspect. I should have tried for better color data but didn't discover the problem until it was too late to get the data this year.

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

Related Designations for NGC6813

NGC6814

NGC 6814 is a face on spiral galaxy about 60 million light-years away in the southern Aquila. Not a constellation that jumps to mind when galaxies are mentioned. I no longer remember what caused me to put it on the to-do list. Possibly it is the somewhat extended northern arm pointing west then southwest. Or maybe that the arms are mostly segments giving some a split arm look Arp cataloged. NED classes it as SAB(rs)bc with HII emission and a Seyfert galaxy. Various sources disagree as to what class of Seyfert it is. NED says 1.2, notes say 1, 1.5 and 2. The NGC project on the other hand classes it as Sb+ I, I don't understand the I at all. Usually, that means "irregular" but I can't see it applying here. NED sees a bar but the NGC project doesn't. Who do you believe? I'm hard pressed to see a bar but many notes indicate it has a short wide one buried in the bright oval core. In any case, the many spiral arms don't seem related to the core at all. They seem to just start at random somewhere near the core then get bright as they move out beyond the end of the oval core region. Edit: It was discovered by William Herschel on August 2, 1788. It's in the second H400 program. I wasn't images this back in 2011 when this was taken so that's now why I imaged it. That's still a mystery.

This one is at -10 degrees declination which puts it in my summer gunk so the image isn't as clear as I'd like. It's rare to get decent seeing in this part of the sky from my location. The temperature difference between the warm water and rising water vapor and the cool night air make for some poor seeing conditions as well as transparency.

There are no other galaxies in the image that NED has any distance data for and only a few are even identified. All that are IR galaxies from the 2MASS survey. For this reason, I didn't prepare an annotated image. There are two asteroids in the image, both above NGC 6814. The easiest to spot is near the top right of center and is a short streak with a hint of red at the lower left end and a hint of blue at the upper right end. Nothing was bright enough in the luminance image for any part of the green trace to show up. It would be beyond the red as I took the data blue, luminance, red and green. Thus the asteroid is in direct prograde motion. It's rare for me to catch one in this part of its yearly path. It is (12508) 1998 FZ113 at magnitude 17.2. The other asteroid is down and to the left of the first and very hard to spot as its trail is only 3.8" of arc long. In is rather alone between stars directly above the left edge of the bright portion of NGC 6814's arms two-thirds of the way to the top. It is in retrograde motion but and moving down at a 45 degree angle (left to right). I must have caught it just after it reversed into retrograde motion for it to be moving so slowly in the sky. It is (44504) 1998 XX34 and is estimated to be 18.3 magnitude.

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

Related Designations for NGC6814

NGC6819

NGC 6819 is an I1r open cluster in Cygnus. It was discovered by Caroline Herschel on March 12, 1784. William apparently never picked it up as it doesn't appear in his data. It is thought to be about 1.5 billion years old. Due to its age, most of the very hot blue stars have long since died. The remaining ones are now red giants giving the brighter stars in the cluster an orange color. Most of the rest are rather white. Its distance is about 7,200 to 7,700 light-years depending on which source you use. Being in Cygnus I expected it to be rather reddened but that wasn't the case as it was only reddened about a quarter of a magnitude.

This image was done in 2008 when my color balancing was most G2V so likely not as accurate as I get today with eXcalibrator. Also, I took only one frame of each color. I can make that work today but didn't know the tricks back in 2008 so the color is a bit weak.

The cluster is easily seen in a 6" scope as many stars are 12th magnitude or brighter. My 10" shows many more stars and sees a bit larger diameter for the cluster. A larger scope likely would do even better.

The cluster was in the field of Kepler for its long term look for exoplanets. I don't know of any it found in the cluster but it did turn up a couple previously unknown eclipsing binary stars in the cluster and 4 others not related to the cluster.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10' RGB=1x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6819

NGC6821

NGC 6821 is a rather disorganized barred spiral galaxy in southern Aquila about 60 million light-years distant both by redshift and Tully-Fisher measurements. It is classified as SB(s)d: HII by NED. The NGC project says SB(rs)Sd. I don't know how to decipher that second "S" unless it is a misprint. Seligman classifies it as SBcd?. They do agree it is a barred spiral and it does show a bar-like structure but I see no nucleus. de Vaucouleurs says in his 1964 "Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies" "Bright bar: 0.2 arcmin x 0.06 arcmin. No definite nucleus. Faint asymmetric spiral structure. Poorly resolved." IT was discovered by Albert Marth on August 8, 1863. It is sometimes considered a pair with MCG -01-50-001 which is a flat galaxy 2MFGC 15085 just off the right edge of my image. I had intended to use coordinates to pick up both but somehow centered on NGC 6821 instead. That may mean a reshoot in the future.

Being well within the Zone of Avoidance there are few galaxies in the field with any information on them. I've annotated all with redshift data as well as galaxies that made the LEDA catalog even if they had no redshift information. Due to obscuring dust in our galaxy this image doesn't go very deep.

Being a bit below -06 degrees every frame contained many geostationary satellites. Many trails overlapped so many times no rejection software could deal with them. Nor could my manual method I use when I have only 2 frames. Thus I had to resort to cloning to remove them. Since the field is just on the north edge of the belt as seen from my latitude all were in the very bottom of the image. Since they went through a lot of faint nebulosity this made the cloning all the more difficult. I hope I haven't distorted things too much.

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

Related Designations for NGC6821

NGC6822

This is a shot of a galaxy in our local group, NGC 6822, commonly known as Barnard's Galaxy as he discovered it with a 6" refractor over 120 years ago. Located about 1.7 million light years away it is a dwarf galaxy. Oddly, it shows little rotational motion, especially in the outer regions. It is full of bubbles blown by newly formed star clusters. The biggest and brightest is actually called the Bubble Nebula, not to be confused with a very different Bubble Nebula formed by a dying star in our own galaxy that I've run here twice before. This is caused by a cluster of super massive, super hot stars that formed out a a cloud of hydrogen gas. Then their intense light blew an ever expanding bubble in the remaining hydrogen. In a few million years the bubble will have expanded so much and so many of the stars that formed it will have gone super nova that it will vanish. This bubble is huge compared to those known in our galaxy. Most of which are 30 or so light years across. This one is about 500 light years in diameter! To be illuminated by stars 250 light years distant you know those stars are super bright!! Actually, this galaxy has many such bubbles, far more than most dwarf galaxies have. NGC 6822 is thought to be very similar to the galaxies that first formed in our universe and which then combined to form more massive galaxies such as our own. Though why it still has so much dust and gas left is somewhat of a mystery. Since we see this galaxy through the dust of our own galaxy it is greatly dimmed and reddened. It would be far bigger and brighter if it was located in a direction looking out of our galaxy rather than into it.

The Hubble Space Telescope can only look at a very tiny part of this object at a time. It studied two of the HII star forming regions, Hubble X and Hubble V. Hubble X is at the upper left of the somewhat faint pink bubble at the top and slightly left of center of the galaxy. It appears as a bright white star at the upper left edge of the ring. In fact, it is a star cluster tightly surrounded by nebulosity, all of which overexposed in my shot to make a white blob. The bubble is apparently an entirely different object unrelated to Hubble X. You can see Hubble's picture of it in false color at:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010216.html

Hubble V is to the right of Hubble X about halfway to the big bubble nebula. A bright star overpowers it to the left of it. Then the cluster of stars that causes it to glow drowns out the much fainter nebula at my low resolution compared to Hubble working above our atmosphere. So only a hint of pink is seen at: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap011225.html This time the colors are close to correct.

You can read more on it at:
http://www.messier.seds.org/xtra/ngc/n6822.html
The photo with this page though seems overly blue but it was taken using film which does often respond very differently than reality in long exposure photos. Also, this page puts the distance at 1.8 million light years which is an old estimate best as I can determine. Some links at this site are broken.

Related Designations for NGC6822

NGC6823

Technically NGC 6823 refers only to the star cluster in this image. NGC 6820 is often cited as the red emission nebula but that is SH2-086. The position of NGC 6820 is close to the knot in the lower right of my image. It is most likely the real NGC 6820.

NGC 6822 was discovered by William Herschel on July 17, 1785. Apparently, he only saw the star cluster. It is in the original H400 program. My notes indicate in my 10", even though I listed the night as good, I never saw the nebula nor most of the cluster. I saw only the very brightest stars in the center of the cluster not a field of stars my image shows. Maybe the night wasn't so good after all. I made no mention of NGC 6820 though that wasn't on my Tiron atlas so I had no idea it was there. Still, it didn't catch my eye. The cluster is less than 7 million years old, some say less than 2 million so possibly still forming stars from the gas we see as SH2-086. The stars aren't all that blue in my image. This is likely due to my inability to properly color balance my very early images. I need to retake this one.

NGC 6820 was first seen by Albert Marth on August 7, 1864. Is the knot a separate object or part of SH2-086? It appears to house a protostar when seen in the 2mass survey. I found no distance data on it. While my white light image doesn't show it connected to SH2-086 H alpha images do. It appears all three objects are likely part of the same complex.

I tried to force this image through many subs rather than adding H alpha data. This is why the image is so poor. I need to redo this one. The data was taken back in 2006 when I had no idea what I was doing and processed using 8 bit software not up to the task. I was so disappointed in how it turned out I never let anyone see it until now. While I have some that came out even worse than this one I knew that so never even tried to process the data. Most have since been retaken but for this one.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=20x10' RGB=4x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6823

NGC6824

NGC 6824 is an SA(s)b: galaxy in northern Cygnus. Redshift puts it about 150 million light-years away. Tully-Fisher estimates run from 120 to 180 million light-years which brackets the redshift distance nicely. Most sources give a size of 1.7 by 1.2 minutes of arc. I find that way too small. I measure it at more like 2.9 by 1.9 minutes of arc. Apparently, they are measuring only the inner bright region. Assuming the 2.9 minute figure I get and the redshift distance it is about 125,000 light-years across, a bit larger than our galaxy.

The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on September 16, 1792. It is on the Herschel 400 II observing list. That is what put it on my to-do list. Cygnus isn't a constellation I normally think of as a place to look for galaxies. Its location in the zone of avoidance means the field is little studied. It is the only galaxy in the image with redshift data. With so little data on the field no annotated image was prepared.

Seeing was very poor the night this was taken but transparency was much greater than usual. This allowed me to get its faint outer halo not often seen even if it meant giving up some detail. Maybe next year I can get an image with good detail and combine the two for both. It seems if transparency is great seeing isn't and vice versa. The uncertainty principle of imaging. This night a cold front cleared out the smoke that had been a pain for so long but left mixing air temperatures ruining seeing.

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

Related Designations for NGC6824

NGC6826

NGC 6826 is apparently the only known triple shell, giant halo planetary. Considering there are only 3 in the first category and 6 in the second that isn't all that surprising. It is in northwestern Cygnus. Distances to planetary nebulae are very hard to determine. One paper cited two other papers giving a range from 2450 to 7385 light-years. It was discovered by William Herschel on September 6, 1793. It is in the second H400 program.

It is also known as the Blinking (Eye) Planetary Nebula. When you look right at the central star the nebula fades greatly only to reappear when you look off to the side. I have seen lots of observers blame this on the lack of sensitivity of the eye's fovea. It's been long known to visual observers that the center of our vision has fewer low-level rod cells so doesn't see faint objects all that well. This is involved but other equally faint planetary nebulae don't exhibit this trait nearly so strongly. Those though don't have 10.4 magnitude central stars. Theirs are several magnitudes fainter. I used a crosshair eyepiece to block the light of the central star. When that was done even looking at where it was the nebula only faded slightly. I think most of the "blink" is due to how our eye/brain handles the fainter nebula around the bright star. Something to test at your next dark sky star party.

You can read a bit more on it at: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1981PASP...93..719F

The other unusual characteristic of this one (not mentioned in the above link) is the FLIERS (Fast Low-Ionization Emission Regions) seen in it. They are the two red regions seen in the HST image (link below). In my RGB image, they come out as bright blue regions on either side of the center shell (mostly hidden by the bright central star). Why they came out blue I don't understand but they did. These FLIERS may not be so "fast" however. There's some indication they are relatively stationary and somehow the gas of the second shell is speeding past them rather than pulling them along with the shell's expansion. Either way FLIERs are hard to explain with our current understanding of Planetary Nebulae.

The only galaxy with a redshift measurement in the image is the brightest in the field. It is west (right) of NGC 6826 and a bit north. It is CGCG 257-010 with a redshift that puts it some 330 million light-years away. All others in the field that NED includes are from the 2MASS survey, as is CGCG 257-010.

Due to the huge brightness difference between the central part of the nebula and the large halo I used two sets of exposures to record this one. The core was exposed using 14 2 minute exposures for the luminance and 2 5 minute exposures for the color data. The rest of the image used my "standard" 4 ten minute luminance and 2 10 minute color frames. The two were then blended together. As usual, all were binned 2x2. I really need a better night for the core. If it happens I'll redo the core region using 1x1 binning.

Hubble's image of the inner two shells using narrowband filters:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1997/38/image/d/

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' and 14x2' RGB=2x10' and 2x5', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC6826

NGC6827

NGC 6827/Berkeley 048 is an open cluster in Vulpecula about 5.5 degrees east of the far more famous Coathanger asterism. It is also known as Berkeley 48. It is classified as a type I3m cluster. It was discovered by Édouard Stephan on October 16, 1878. WEBDA puts its distance at 13,000 light-years. Reddening dust can be seen across most of the image, especially to the upper right. Areas rather dust free can be seen to the lower left though even there reddening dust crosses part of the image. The lack of stars to the upper left is likely due to dust obscuring them rather than a real lack of stars in that part of the galaxy as that is toward the plane of the galaxy. WEBDA says the dust results in a full magnitude of reddening for the cluster which explains some of the redder than normal stars that appear to populate the cluster. WEBDA puts its age at about 800 million years which also means its bluest stars have long since died leaving a cluster that is somewhat reddened by age alone. A quick search of Google and AstroBin turned up no color images of this cluster.

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

Related Designations for NGC6827