NGC7026

NGC 7026 is a bipolar (maybe multi-polar) planetary nebula in the tail of Cygnus the Swan. Distances to planetary nebula are hard to determine. I've seen a wide range from 0.75 kpc to about 2 kpc. 1.90 kpc seems to be a reasonable median value of modern estimates. For the parsec impaired that is about 6,200 light-years. Give or take quite a bit. It is sometimes called the "Cheeseburger Nebula" though I can't see how it got that name. It was discovered by Sherburne Burnham on July 6, 1873.

This one is quite small, less than 30" of arc in its longest dimension. I've had to wait many years for seeing to be good enough to try 0.5" per pixel resolution when imaging it. Then I managed to underestimate how bright it was and pretty well saturated the brightest parts which made the central star far more difficult than it should be. This also cost detail in the brightest regions. I normally use 20 minute subs when working at 0.5" per pixel but cut that back to 10 knowing it was bright. I should have used about 3 or 4 minutes to best show the brightest regions. This one is much like M42 in that it needs short exposure time for the brightest part but other areas benefit from much longer sky limited exposures. If I ever get sufficient seeing again I'll have to give it another try. For now, this will have to do.

There's not much to see in the full image but the planetary and lots of stars. I adjusted the stretch to knock down the stars as much as possible. This may have cost me some background galaxies though I suspect little gets through the dense dust in this area of our galaxy.

The full image is huge at 4008x2672 pixels. This was cropped to 3500x2500 to meet size limits of the website where the image was originally stored. Nothing but random stars were lost by this. I've also included an 800x800 pixel crop which again loses only field stars. All are at 0.5" per pixel, same as I imaged it.

This one is occasionally seen on the net. Those few show more red than I got. That is in the areas I nearly saturated so I assume that's why I lost the red. In turn, I picked up blue regions not seen on most internet postings of it that I've seen. This one, as mentioned above, needs two different exposures as it covers such a wide luminance range, too much for my CCD. It will have to do for now however as sufficient seeing is super rare here of late.

Unfortunately while seeing was great this night we had very high (over 70 kph) east winds (nasty storm approaching) which bounced the scope elongating stars. I normally don't open such nights but seeing was great so I had to give it a try and risk something smashing into the scope. Odd too in that high winds usually means horrid seeing. I had to apply some correction to the stars due to the issues the wind created (mostly on one slightly diagonal axis). So the stars are a bit wonky as I did this globally rather than each star individually since there were too many for that approach.

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

Related Designations for NGC7026

NGC7031

NGC 7031 is a bright but sparse open cluster in Cygnus about 3,000 light-years distant. WEBDA says it is about 140 million years old. Thus the most massive stars have long since died leaving mostly A and less massive stars. It is reddened by about 0.85 magnitudes. That may explain the lack of blue stars in the cluster. The image was blue starved due to severe smoke here. This also limited the fainter stars I could pick up.

I found only one color image that included this cluster and then only in the upper left corner. It was taken by the "Dust Buster" Tom Davis back in 2009 so I assume he had no smoke. His resolution was less than mine but it does seem to show similar star colors to mine so I think I compensated fairly well for the loss of blue due to the smoke. But the smoke put a haze over the cluster I was only sort of successful removing.

The cluster was discovered by William Herschel on September 21, 1788. His or Dreyer's description read reads "A cluster of triple stars, a little compressed". I can see a nice triangle of stars that fit that description but the other triples are a bit of a mystery. The orange star dominates yet wasn't mentioned. While it is in the second H400 program my notes from that are lost and I never looked at it again.

Most list this cluster as being just the area of the bright stars in my image I suspect there's a background of fainter stars lost to my smoke. I do see a lot of faint stars that barely made it through my smoke to the lower right of the cluster. They'd be too faint for Herschel to have seen and likely have nothing to do with the cluster. SIMBAD suggests it might be a double cluster with NGC 7086 which is some 4 degrees away and by WEBDA about 1000 light-years more distant. I took that one 6 years ago.

The annotated image shows a second star cluster's location that while closer to the area of fainter stars is still mostly north of what I'd wondered was a cluster. I can't find anything on it. Two dark nebulae are also in the image. LDN 1000 seems to be well west of where SIMBAD puts it. I put the label atop the location which doesn't seem as obscured as the region to the west. At the very bottom of the image is the very top of LDN 999 which does appear to match its location, just that I put most of out of my frame.

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

Rick

Related Designations for NGC7031

NGC7042

NGC 7042 and 7043 are a pair of spiral galaxies in southwest Pegasus just above Equuleus and east of Delphinus about 220 million light-years distant. Both are rather strange once you look closely. NGC 7042 while listed simply as Sb by NED and the NGC Project, it is Sb? at Seligman. At first glance, it appears rather normal but look closely. One arm comes off tangentially to the bottom of the core, no other arm comes from the core, they all seem to come from this one arm. First, a second bright arm comes off of it before it has gone very far. A bit further along and a faint arm comes off that stays above the first split off arm to the north but on the east side the two cross. The bright arm ends soon after the crossing after making a sharp left turn. The fainter arm is now much brighter and continues on around to make a near full circle before hitting an orange star. Beyond the star, it continues well past its starting point this time outside of the one arm that started everything but as a rather diffuse arc. The area between arms seems full of very red dust. In short, it is quite weird once you look at it. The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on October 16, 1784 and is listed in the second Herschel 400 observing program.

NGC 7043 is sometimes listed as nonexistent after it failed to show up on the edge of a very poor photographic plate full of defects that was also very underexposed. Even the big boys screw up an image! It is listed as SBa: by NED, SB:a by The NGC Project (likely a typo for where the colon appears and SBa? by Seligman. The bar is very short and spawns two strong arms that would form a perfect right but for something going very wrong to the southwest where it suddenly turns into a squiggle. Its redshift puts it slightly closer than NGC 7042 but I suspect they are really at about the same distance. The weird arms of 7042 and the failed ring of 7043 may be due to interaction between the two. NGC 7043 was discovered by Albert Marth on August 18, 1863.

Assuming a distance of 215 million light-years to split the difference between the two distance estimates I get a size of about 110,000 light-years for NGC 7042. NGC 7043 is about 70,000 light-years across.

The only other object with redshift data is the BL LAC object shown on the annotated image near the bottom center. The position given by NED and several object ID's for it is for a position several seconds west of an orange galaxy that is the right magnitude though the error bar for the position is much smaller than the real error if it is the object. One ID, the one I used on the annotated image, gives the position of the object so I assume I've got it right. NED lists it as a quasar which are often blue but also as a BL Lac object. The actual BL LAC is a bright huge elliptical galaxy that appears nearly starlike. Being elliptical galaxies they can be red like this but I'm seeing it as galaxy rather than the quasar NED says it is.

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

Related Designations for NGC7042

NGC7044

NGC 7044 is an open cluster in Cygnus not far from the famous North American Nebula. It was discovered by William Herschel on October 17, 1786. It is in the original Herschel 400 object list. My log from June 14, 1985 on a fair but humid night using my 10" f/5 at 180x reads: "Small, very faint, irregular puff of an open star cluster at 60x. At 180x three stars resolved with averted vision. Difficult to tell this is an open cluster. Not a winner." I wonder how much the humidity was bothering transparency. I've never looked at it since as far as I can determine.

I couldn't find any authoritative distance for the cluster. WEBDA puts its distance as a bit over 10,000 light-years. One paper puts the age of the cluster as 1.04 to 1.2 billion years. Its lack of massive blue stars would support this age determination. Open clusters tend to be ripped apart by tidal forces before they get this old. This one apparently has sufficient mass to avoid being ripped to pieces.
http://cds.aanda.org/index.php?Itemid=129&option=com_article&access=bibcode&bibcode=2004A%25252526A...414..163S

Located in the Milky Way it is seen against a dense star field. Being near the North American and Pelican Nebula complex there is some faint H alpha across the image. It was pretty featureless and reduced contrast to the cluster. I processed the image to ignore this background as it added nothing but a noisy faint red glow. With a lot more time and filtered H alpha data, it might work to show it. I decided it was better if suppressed in my limited exposure time image.

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

Related Designations for NGC7044

NGC7048

NGC 7048 is a rather nice planetary nebula in Cygnus about half way between M39 and the North American Nebula that I've managed to avoid imaging until late September 2011. I find several distance estimates for it indicating how hard it is to determine the distances to these objects. The closest puts it at 1900 light-years away. The most distant says 8800 light-years while the newest I could find (2004) says 4900 light-years. Flip your three sided coin for the answer. The stars seen against the nebula are all foreground or background stars except for the faint blue central star whose UV light is causing the gasses, expelled a few thousand years ago by the dying star, to glow. It has a surprising amount of detail in it that, thanks to better than normal seeing, I was able to bring out. In fact, seeing was so good I should have imaged it at 0.5" per pixel instead of my standard 1" per pixel but since I was sound asleep while the computer took the data I didn't realize how good the seeing had become as the night progressed.

The nebula was discovered in 1878, by Jean Marie Edouard Stephan, using a 31.5-inch reflector. At magnitude 12.1 and about a minute of arc across it isn't a really bright planetary but should be visible in an 8" scope under reasonably dark skies.

One source called it the Ornament Nebula. I'd not heard that name before. It does sort of fit if you like amorphous colored Christmas tree balls I suppose. Another imager suggested "Alien Nebula" as he thought he saw a face in it.

Due to all the stars, the file size is rather large at nearly 800K. It's worth looking at the full image as to the upper right is the reflection nebula (SIMBAD's description) GN 21.11.4. It is weird in that it isn't mostly around its illuminating star but mostly to one side of it. Also, it isn't blue but a color that to me appears a mix of H alpha and the color of the illuminating star. However, if the illuminating star is the one in its lower edge it wouldn't have the UV light needed to create H alpha emission. So the H alpha is likely an illusion. Also, it has a very dark, but not black hole in it. This appears to me due to barely illuminated dust rather than a true hole in the nebula. A similarly colored nebula surrounds a nearby star to the northeast. I found no separate designation for it in SIMBAD. I've included these in the enlarged, cropped image.

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

Related Designations for NGC7048

NGC7062

NGC 7062 is a small open cluster in northeastern Cygnus about 2.5 degrees south-southwest of M39. WEBDA gives it a distance of about 4,800 light-years and an age of about 300 million years. That's old enough some of the most massive stars could have turned into red giants. Whether the red stars seen in the cluster are such members I can't say. I didn't find anything on that. The cluster was discovered by William Herschel on October 19, 1788 using his 18.7" reflector. Thus I imaged it as part of my quest for those in the Herschel 400 list I can reach at my latitude. This one is rather well suited to my limited field of view.

My visual observation notes from June 14, 1985 using my 10" f/5 reflector on a fair but humid night at up to 180x reads: "Irregular, somewhat diamond shaped open cluster tucked between two bright stars." I'm not sure what two stars I meant. Probably the blue on the lower right side of the cluster and the more white one at the same declination on the left side. Don't seem so obviously bright in this image, however. Digital images seem to flatten magnitude ranges to fit them into the limited range of a computer monitor.

Note the fall off of stars on the eastern (left) side of the image especially toward the top. This appears to be LDN 980 a rather ill-defined dark nebula. Though it is centered southeast of the cluster out of my frame.

Due to a typing error, I ended up with 4 blue frames rather than my normal 2. That resulted in somewhat better signal to noise ratio for the blue image but since stars already have a rather good signal to noise ratio it made no real difference to the color data.

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

Related Designations for NGC7062

NGC7067

NGC 7067 is an open cluster in Cygnus about 1.3 degrees west of M39. It was discovered by William Herschel on September 27, 1788. It is in the second H400 program. Dreyer's description says: "A cluster, poor, nebulous?" I think we can rule out the nebulous part. Its position is rather odd. I've centered the cropped image on the position most catalogs give. That seemed odd as the main group of stars lies about 100 seconds of arc west of the position. A very recent paper, December 17, 2016 identified 139 likely cluster members. The position they got matches the main star group rather than the position to the east. Was that influenced by the bright blue star further east? If so according to the paper it is not a cluster member. You can find the preprint of the paper here. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.05181.pdf

WEBDA gives an age for the cluster of 100 million years, making it quite young and lists a distance of about 12,000 light-years. The paper, however, disagrees with putting the cluster a bit more distant. They used two different measurements. One gives a distance of 14,300 light-years with an error bar of +- 1,300 light-years. The other gives a distance of 13,000 light-years +- 2,600 light-years so includes the other distance estimate. Moving the cluster a bit further away has a rather profound effect on its age. By the original 12,000 light-year distance, WEBDA and other put the age at the 100 million year mark I mentioned. But the new paper's distance changes that to only 20 million years making it a very young cluster. I'd expect some dust and gas might still be around from its formation but see none though the area is rich in non-ionized hydrogen according to other papers I read. I don't see this having anything to do with the cluster, however. I'd have thought being that young, the stars would be even more vivid blue. That may be explained by WEBDA's estimate that its stars are reddened by 0.75 magnitudes.

Unfortunately, some very warm weather altered the collimation of my scope far more than my normal summer adjustment allowed for. The result with my scope is the right side of the image is severely out of focus. Not processing right away I didn't catch it so have a few more images that will have a strong issue with the side of the frame being out of focus. I have since made the correction and the current data is much better. Due to this and the lack of detail in the image other than stars I've reproduced the full image at only 1.5" per pixel though the cropped image is at my usual full frame 1" per pixel image scale.

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

Related Designations for NGC7067

NGC7076

NGC 7076, a planetary nebula, was discovered by William Herschel on October 15, 1794 as III 936 with a slightly wrong position. It was listed in the RNGC as a diffuse nebula. Abell rediscovered it as entry 75 in his list but didn't realize it was the same object as the misplaced NGC 7076. All this was corrected for the third RNGC corrections list. While a William Herschel discovery, it didn't make either of the Astronomical Herschel 400 observing programs. It's very unsymmetrical shape would indicate it is interacting with the interstellar medium which is compressing it on the leading side (east) creating the apparent shock front.

I found one distance estimate of 4,800 light-years per the Chandra Planetary Nebula Survey. If correct it's size is 1.5 x 1.4 light-years. However, I found another distance estimate (source unknown) of 7,100 light-years making it 50 percent larger. I prefer the first estimate as I'd expect it to be dimmer if of the larger size. It is located in Cepheus a bit less than a degree east-northeast of Alderamin (Alpha Cephei).

While there are a few galaxies listed in NED for this field none have distance data, all are from the 2MASS survey so are identified only by their J2000 coordinates with only one having even a magnitude listed. It's an almost starlike 16th magnitude orange spot like dozens of anonymous galaxies in the image and not worth noting. No annotated image was made for this reason.

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

Related Designations for NGC7076

NGC7077

NGC 7081 is a peculiar galaxy in northern Aquarius. In fact, the top 25% of the image is in Pegasus just east of its border with Equuleus. It is classified as SB pec? by NED and S? by the NGC Project. Redshift puts it about 130 million light-years distant. It was discovered by William Herschel on October 10, 1790 but is in neither of the Herschel 400 observing programs. Its spiral structure is somewhat indistinct with many star knots being its most prominent feature. The odd organization would indicate it may have interacted with another galaxy in the recent past.

In this case we have a good candidate for the mugging, UGC 1176 to the southeast. It has the same redshift and it too is a rather odd spiral with star knots and one heavy arm. The latter would have qualified it under that category in Arp's catalog. His catalog has no entries for the 21st hour angle. This would also fill that gap. It is classified as SAB(s)bc pec? by NED. I guess they can't decide if either of these meet the peculiar requirements or not. While I found nothing indicating anyone has even considered if they are interacting it seems to me rather likely they did at one time.

If they truly are at the same distance then their cores are only 180,000 light-years apart. Certainly, that's close enough for them to feel the other's gravitational effects. Though neither is a huge galaxy. NGC 7081 is about 51,000 light years in diameter including the faint shell about it. UGC 11760 is somewhat smaller at 41,000 light-years across.

A second NGC galaxy is in the image on the far right. It is NGC 7077 a Blue Compact Dwarf. NED classifies it as E one place and S0 another. The NGC Project says E? while Seligman says E1?. I included it as in my framing sub it appeared to have a double core. I found one reference to it as having a double core. Turned out to just be a blue star. But between the blue star and the core is a star knot (lost in the glare of the star in my image). It can be seen in the Sloan image which I've attached. Still, a star knot is not a second core to my way of thinking. Several other much fainter knots can be seen in the Sloan image as well near the core. Redshift puts it only 38 million light-years distant while the average of two non-redshift measurements say 50 million light-years. Using the closer distance it is only 5,700 light-years across so certainly is a dwarf in size. It was discovered by Albert Marth (#445 on his list) on August 11, 1863.

While a study was made of this area for emission line galaxies and over 100 are in the image they are all at the very limit of my image due to poor transparency this night so I've not attempted to point them out. All the obvious background galaxies are also listed in NED but without redshift data so I've not annotated them. I only annotated those with redshift distance that were easily seen and didn't look like a star just above the noise level.

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

Related Designations for NGC7077

NGC7080

NGC 7080 is a barred spiral some 200 million light-years behind the constellation of Vulpecula so close to the border with Pegasus that the left part of the image is in Pegasus. Vulpecula is a rather galaxy free constellation. NGC 7080 is seen through some galactic cirrus. It is rather faint so I used more time than usual trying to bring it out. An unbelievable (for me) 2 hours and 20 minutes of luminance data and 40 minutes of each color taken over 4 days last July. It was located in satellite alley with nearly every sub (color and luminance) containing at least one satellite. Many nearly as faint as the cirrus. Due to the similarity in brightness, even a sigma combine failed to fully remove them after the severe stretch needed to bring out the cirrus was applied.

NGC 7080 is classed as SB(r)b. It was discovered in 1863 by Albert Marth. It was independently found by Édouard Stephan on August 31, 1872. That discovery is listed as NGC 7054 I've seen it in a 10" scope though I needed very good skies. It seemed dimmer than its rated 13.1 visual magnitude. I was surprised that it was somewhat red in color. This might be due to all the dust we are viewing it through. The few color images of it I was able to find showed it much bluer than what I came up with. At first, I thought I'd made an error someplace but then noticed its blue magnitude is 0.6 magnitudes fainter than its green magnitude. This is a rather large difference and indicates it really is reddened. The newly released Sloan expanded coverage data image also shows it rather reddened as well. I hoped that NED had picked up this new data but apparently not so there's no redshift data available for any of the other galaxies in my image.

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

Related Designations for NGC7080