PAL8

Palomar 8 is a dim globular in Sagittarius almost 42,000 light years distant and 18,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy. That means we have to look clear across the disk of our galaxy to see it through all the dust that blocks our view. Fortunately, in this particular direction, the dust isn't too thick and we can see it in ordinary light though greatly dimmed. Its diameter is stated to be about 13.5 minutes of arc across but I can see only the center 5 minutes of that in my image. Beyond that, the stars are lost in the dense star field of the Milky Way. The cluster was discovered in 1952 by George Abell.

This one is well below my 15 degree south limit. Seeing rarely allows me to go this low, especially in 2012 but one night it did -- but not for long and in a twilight sky. It was about to vanish into my Meridian Tree so I had only a very short window. I grabbed 2 luminance frames and one for each color hoping to get more luminance but the tree won. It isn't getting taller very fast but is getting wider. I'm not sure which is worse. Thanks to twilight the background was 10 times normal limiting how deep I could go but considering how many stars I did capture maybe that wasn't such a bad thing.

When I first looked at the data I was going to give up and try again the following year but usable seeing this low is very rare and my window very small thanks to the Meridian Tree blocking much of the best seeing and least atmospheric extinction. So I gave it a try. To get enough data I combined all 5 frames into a pseudo luminance image. With only 10 minutes of color and with blue very poor in signal to noise ratio due to being so low in the sky the color is rather questionable. I tried to compensate for reddening both from looking so low in the sky and for all the galactic dust we look through to see this cluster but blue was so weak this didn't work very well. So I had to compromise and sort of compensate for the reddening. This weak data required about every trick I have in my bag of tricks and one new one I developed on the fly. The new one was how to deal with the elongation of the stars in the luminance image due to color dispersion this low in the sky. Pure RGB would avoid this issue but requires far more time than I had available. I surprised myself with how good it turned out. This would have been spectacular if much higher in the sky and under a dark sky rather than twilight.

This is the last of the Palomar globulars for me. 6, 9 and 12 are even further south than 8. Too far south for the walls of the observatory as well as trees even if seeing would cooperate. At least I got a dozen of the 15.

14" LX200R @ f/10, Pseudo L=2Lx10'+1 each x 10' RGB, RGB=1x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for PAL8

PARSAMYAN 21

Parsamyan 21/Parsamian 21 is a reflection nebula caused by the outflow from the young FU Orionis star HBC 687. Coming from its south end is the Herbig Haro object HH221 which may be the little jet seen below the bright cloud that hides the star. This nebula is located in Aquila. I was unable to find a distance estimate for it. Some papers likened this nebula to the far more famous Hubble's Variable Nebula. Though about the only similarity I see is the faint southern jet. It certainly doesn't have the ringlike shape of Parsamyan 21. See also Jim Shuder's fine image of this object at: http://www.pbase.com/jshuder/image/137713564/large .

The illuminating and creating star is listed as a variable but photometric data in one paper found only a very tiny fluctuation in its brightness over the years so while it varies it is barely noticeable. The star itself is hidden by the dust and gas around it though it can be seen in IR light according to one paper which had a picture showing just the star and no hint of nebulosity. If you look very closely at my image it appears there is a bit of faint nebulosity to the northeast and north-northwest. It would take a lot of hours to bring that out at my image scale. Except for that, it appears there may be dark dust not illuminated by the star around the nebula as it sits in a slightly dark hole in the stars. Some of the lack of stars matches where the faint nebulosity is in my image. WISE shows a red circular blob that is centered on the star, not the nebula or the dark cloud that I see. http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/applications/wise/#id=Hydra_wise_wise_1&projectId=wise&startIdx=0&pageSize=0&shortDesc=Position&isBookmarkAble=true&isDrillDownRoot=true Enter Parsamian 21 in the search box and hit search. Click on the Multi-color tab above the IRAS image. The circle in all images is centered on the illuminating star according to their position cursor. The longer the wavelength the larger the blob and the cooler the dust it is seeing.

I imaged this one at 0.5" per pixel. The professional images I found on the net show it bluer than either Jim or I saw it. I can't explain the difference.


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Related Designations for PARSAMYAN 21

PEGASUSDWARF

the Pegasus Dwarf is a nearby galaxy also known as UGC 12613 and Pegasus DIG (Dwarf Irregular Galaxy). You'd think that being a very nearby galaxy we'd know its distance very accurately. NOT! There is much disagreement here. Some say it is a distant satellite of M31, others say it is a member of the M31 group. These would put its distance at about 3 million light years. Others say it is a neighbor of IC 1613 which would put it some 5.5 million light years away. The annotated image goes with the median of 24 measurements at NED. Though if you leave out the older measurements and go with just the newer ones then its distance is about 3 million light-years, a bit beyond M31. The galaxy was discovered by A. G. Wilson sometime in the 1950's according to Wikipedia. They put it a companion of M31 at 3 million light-years.

Pegasus DIG contains so little dust and gas you can see right through it's densest region. What looks like possibly the core of the galaxy (a tad off center) is really a distant galaxy with the catalog name of SDSS J232835.87+144413.5. As with much of Sloan Digital Sky Survey catalog, its distance hasn't yet been determined. Since other galaxies in the area of its brightness are in a small cluster 900 million light years away, I'll assume it is a member of that group. Such assumptions can be risky, however. The obvious near edge on spiral is UGC 12613 at 900 million light-years. Off the Southeast (lower left) end Pegasus DIG is the spherical, near star-like galaxy, IV Zw 152 at 910 million light-years. Off the opposite end is a much smaller star-like galaxy surrounded by a fairly large fuzzy halo. This is SDSS J232817.48+144509.2 at 1.8 billion light years. The field is full of galaxies, half of which are fainter than my limiting magnitude due to the snow. NED lists well over 500 within 5 minutes of arc of this galaxy. That's about its length in my shot. So nearly every star-like object you see that isn't perfectly round, and some that are, are really distant galaxies. Maybe next time I can image it without snow on the ground.

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

Related Designations for PEGASUSDWARF

PEGASUSII

The Pegasus II galaxy cluster is anchored by three NGC elliptical-like galaxies, NGC 7499 classified by NED as SA(s)^0^, NGC 7501 E1 and 7503 E2, all three are listed as being Bright Cluster Galaxies. All three were discovered by Albert Marth on September 24, 1864. The cluster is located a bit over a half billion light-years from us. NED describes the cluster as being 68, minutes across 4 times the size of my field. They list it as having 175 members and fitting Zwicky's Compact classification.

In my annotated image I listed the redshift distances of all galaxies NED had redshift data for. I probably should have listed only those not a cluster member and saved a lot of time but as there were some background galaxies that appeared virtually identical to the much closer group members I ended up listing all of them. Though most only had designations at NED that were their position which made their names very long. So long they'd often overlap. So I just used G for galaxy followed by the distance unless they had a shorter catalog name.

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Related Designations for PEGASUSII

PELICAN

This is another nebula that's way too big for my scope -- IC 5070 -- the Pelican Nebula. So named because it looks like a pelican, even without much imagination. It is right beside another huge nebula, the North American Nebula which looks much like North America and Central America. They are really one big nebula with a dark nebula obscuring parts to make them appear as two different nebulae as well as giving them their distinctive shape. A shot of both can be seen at: http://www.skyfactory.org/ngc7000/ngc7000.htm

The Pelican is to the right of "Florida". If you zoom in on it you may even find the part of the back of the neck of the Pelican shown in my much larger scale image. What star or stars cause this nebula to glow seems unknown. I've seen some say it is Deneb but the generally accepted distance to Deneb is a lot more distant than the generally accepted distance to the nebula making this impossible. Most say Deneb is 4 to 7 thousand light-years away while most peg the nebula at 1.5 to 3 thousand light years. Determining distance can be very difficult for objects such as this. For a close up of the same area, I photographed but by the 4 meter telescope (largest) on Kitt Peak see: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap031013.html
Click on the image for a full-size view that is oriented the same as mine. Their image is taken in the light of Silicon, hydrogen and oxygen to make an artificially colored image, silicon and hydrogen are both red while oxygen is a green tinted blue color so they change the hydrogen's color to blue for these images screwing up the colors but making it easier for the scientists. My shot is a standard LRGB image not isolating any element. Obviously, the hydrogen dominates as there's very little blue or green in my image. The full name is Pelican_L6X5R2X5GB3X5.jpg. One of my red images was lost to an airplane flying over with its landing lights on. It made using the image impossible. Even then I don't lack for red information! In areas where the obscuring matter is weak, you'll notice a tremendous number of new stars that have formed out of this nebula. In other areas there's so much obstruction there are few stars bright enough to shine through. Most seen in these areas are foreground stars.

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Related Designations for PELICAN

PERSEUS1

Perseus 1 also known as kkh 011 and ZOAG G135.74-04.53 is a heavily obscured galaxy in Perseus. It is considered to be a member of the heavily obscured Maffei group. It is classed in NED as dE/N which translates to a dwarf elliptical galaxy with a star-like nucleus. So that orange object near its center is really its core and not a slightly elongated foreground star as I first thought it was. I found little in the way of distance measurements for it but most Maffei galaxies are in the 10 million light-year range. NED shows a slight redshift that would put it 6 million light-years away but the error bars for such a measurement are very high. In fact, another source has it blueshifted! There is some light nebulosity in the foreground making it hard to determine the boundaries of the galaxy. In fact, I find several different size estimates for it. NED says 1.12 by 0.9 minutes while a listing of Maffei galaxies says its longest dimension is 2.2 minutes, doubling its length. They don't give a second width. I can't get a width over about 0.7 minutes but my length using a conservative estimate of where it ends and the background nebulosity begins says 1.3 minutes and a maximum of about 2.4 minutes. My image scale is 1.01" per pixel so you can do your own estimating. Shows just how difficult it is to measure these highly obscured galaxies.

Being in such a highly obscured region there are no other objects in the image other than stars. It is located only about 1.25 degrees south of the Double Cluster. I had planned double my normal exposure times but the second run ran into nasty clouds. None of the luminance images were usable with one red and one green frame lost as well. A nasty 5th magnitude star, 9 Persei, an A2 slightly variable star was just west of the bottom right corner of the image. It cast some nasty halos into the image. I may have lost some background nebulosity to those halos. For some reason, they only are in the blue and luminance frames.

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Related Designations for PERSEUS1

PERSEUS2

Perseus 2 also known as KKH 12 is a likely member of the Maffei 1 group of nearby galaxies hidden by our galaxies dust and gas. It is located on the east-northeastern edge of the double cluster which explains the increase in rather bright blue stars toward the western (right) side of the image. The lone estimate of its distance which is based on the assumption it is part of the group puts it at 3 kiloparsecs or about 10,000 light-years to one significant digit. Now you can all go back to your images of the double cluster and see if you picked it up! NED considers it an irregular galaxy. Looks pretty much like a featureless disk galaxy to me. There's an oblong orange object near its core. I can't tell if it is a core, which doesn't fit the irregular classification, or a double star in our galaxy too close for me to separate. Looking at its PSF I'd say it is one object as the center of it is the brightest pixel in my FITS image. This would make it a spiral galaxy if correct so I'm likely wrong. It is surprisingly neutral in color for such an obscured galaxy. That could mean it is a very blue galaxy if we could see it without all the dust and gas of our galaxy blocking the view. Of course, that argues against the orange object being its core.

The only other obvious galaxy in the image is LEDA 168301 to the south-west of Perseus 2. NED has no significant information on it. They classify it as U. I have no idea what U means. They leave that classification blank when there isn't one so I doubt it means unknown. If anyone out there knows please let me know. It appears heavily reddened by the dust of our galaxy.

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Related Designations for PERSEUS2

PETESCHULTZ

This is an intentional image of asteroids. I was fortunate to go to high school with Pete Schultz. We helped form the Prairie Astronomy Club in 1961 we did a lot of astrophotography together from a cow pasture south of Lincoln Nebraska. I found many cowpies the hard way, he seemed to avoid them. He worked for a camera store and would show up with some really nice gear the store let him field test. So he was using thousands of dollars worth of gear while I was using home made stuff and el cheapo cameras and lenses scrounged from the used bin at camera stores. Now he shoots holes in comets (Deep Impact) and the moon "LCROSS) and gets sued by a Russian astrologer for ruining her so called forecasts. I wish I was kidding, but he no longer attends conferences in Russia for fear of being arrested.

This June (2010) we were both giving talks at the same gathering. As usual his was better and far more exciting as he used a gun to create craters that perfectly modeled ejecta trajectories of known impacts. These showed why LCROSS' change of target at the last minute prevented the impact from being seen from earth. He still has the same energy he had over 50 years ago. Wish I did. My grown son's comment about our talks was "Neat Dad but your friend was AWESOME!" He was, I have to agree. Anyway, he told me that he has an asteroid named after him so I had to give a go at imaging it for him.

I tried taking his asteroid last summer but it was lost in dense Milky Way and further away so much fainter. Conditions were much better this year. It was against a far less dense star field and a couple magnitudes brighter at magnitude 17.3.

There are three other asteroids in the image.
(168440) 1998 WT2 at magnitude 19.2
(147923) 2006 VK34 at magnitude 19.3
(19753) 2000 CL94 at magnitude 17.1

These are all estimated magnitudes by the minor planet center. Sometimes I find I disagree with their estimates but these seem quite reasonable compared to my data. Sorry Pete -- you weren't the brightest in the field.

The naming citation for his asteroid reads:
"Peter H. Schultz, a geologist at Brown University, has studied cratering phenomena experimentally and in the field. He has played a major role in defining and developing the Deep Impact mission, particularly through his cratering experiments at the NASA Ames Vertical Gun Range."

I'm encluding a picture from the 2010 of Pete (left) and me on the right. The fellow in the middle is Jack Dunn the local planetarium director at the time (since retired). Pete's the oldest and the only one not retired.

Animation and the still image are made from the same data.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

The still and annotated images are attached. None of the galaxies in the image had red shift data available so only the asteroids are pointed out on the annotated image.

Related Designations for PETESCHULTZ

PGC003182

MCG+12-02-001/PGC 3182 is a major train wreck of two galaxies about 200 million light-years from us in northern Cassiopeia. NED classifies each as E? pec and as LIRG (Luminous InfraRed Galaxies). There is so much dust that these came out super red when I processed them. Very little blue was seen in either except near the cores. An artificial color image by the HST shows what appear to be expected colors without the dust. I assume they made severe adjustments for the dust. I looked up the IR and blue frames used on the HST site and the result was the same color I was getting. I normally don't adjust one part of an image to get a galaxy or whatever "right". I normally adjust the entire frame based on the stars using eXcalibrator. The HST image and text about it can be found here: http://hubblesite.org/image/2330/news_release/2008-16 Their version has south at the top while I put north at the top. They give a distance of 200 million light-years or 50 million parsecs. It appears they rounded that to one significant digit. NED's redshift puts it at about 210 million light-years using my usual two significant digits. One highly suspect Tully-Fisher measurement says 42 million parsecs which works out to be 140 million light-years. NASA's 50 million parsecs is 160 million light-years which is close to the T-F measurement while the light-year figure agrees well with the redshift measurement. In other words, we don't really know its distance very well at all.

These are not very large galaxies even all spread out by the collision. Assuming a distance of 200 million light-years the lower (southern) galaxy is a tad over 50,000 light-years across and the upper 60 million light-years across its much wider but far less populated plumes. Obviously before the collision both were much smaller with the southern one probably larger. It's higher mass helping to hold its plumes in check while the lower mass of the northern galaxy allowed it to be pretty well torn apart and spread all over. At least that's what I saw back in the early 1980's when I ran simplified galaxy collisions on what passed for a powerful computer of the day.

This far north and deep in the Zone of Avoidance there is no useful data on anything else in the image so no annotated image was prepared.

After seeing the initial 10 frames I realized this one was so obscured I needed more data so ran it a second time for twice my usual data. It could have used even more.

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Related Designations for PGC003182

PGC009247

PGC 9247 is a SAB(rs)bc spiral galaxy about 210 million light-years distant in the southeast corner of Andromeda. While its core region is relatively bright and lacks blue stars it is surrounded by a very faint set of very blue arms. This too was taken through thick smoke that has plagued me in late September from fires over 1600 km from me. The smoke had thinned some by the time this was taken and didn't totally kill blue and green light as it had for a couple earlier objects. Still, it cost me a lot of photons making the field a couple magnitudes fainter than it should be and nearly cost me any chance to catch the faint outer arms. Still, I think the color balance is closer to reality for this one than others taken through the thick smoke. Seeing was better as well but far from great.

This area of the sky is poorly studied for galaxies and only one other had any redshift data. It's near the upper edge of my frame to the east, left. NED identifies it as KIG 0102:[VOV2007] 011 while my The Sky gives it the extended PGC designation of PGC 2153581. NED puts it at magnitude 15.1 while The Sky says 17.3. My image, even with the smoke agrees with The Sky saying 17.2 but my smoke compensation may not be perfect. NED follows a magnitude estimate with the filter used. In this case, they show "E" in that field. I know of no such filter. If anyone knows let me know. I can only think it is for "Estimate" in which case it is way off the mark.

The only other object in the field with redshift data at NED is a quasar near the left edge also in the northeast quadrant. Nothing else in the field has redshift data so I didn't identify what few others NED even listed.

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Related Designations for PGC009247