Mike JW

Hi Achim,

A new one for me - never heard of the Golden Handle. Beautiful drawing.

Mike

Hi 'Lurcher',

I always enjoy your approach to lunar sketching - catches the feel of the object.

Mike

Martin.,

A very enjoyable read. Colour definitely helps with the view.  I shall look up the various articles later.

Mike

Enjoyed the read and OP Aur. Visually I have often hunted out carbon stars - they tend to look orangey red.

Mike

Skies last night were wonderfully steady but there was a milkiness about them which with the moonlight makes for poor, soft views. I suspect that if the skies had been more transparent then more detail would have been captured.

Mike

What to do when the moon is bright and high - go Super Nova spotting.

SN 2021J in galaxy NGC 4414 is about mag 14.8 and a type 1a. It is the obvious bright spot just below the core.

SN 2021gmj is a type 2 in NGC 3310 and is about mag 15 and lies in the spiral arm to the south (below the core).  NGC 3310 is also Arp 217. The right hand shot is from about a year ago as a comparison. I was using the C11 and achieved a much better shot due to the lack of moonlight. Last night I kept the sub time very short to try to counteract the washed out effect due to the intense moonlight but I lost details in doing this.

Mike

Thanks Martin for adding in the Arps. I have checked my Arp 145 but it does not add any extra detail. Always a mystery how you get those extra spider spikes in this shot but I do rather like them - adds to the drama.

Mike

Sketching rekindled my lunar observing and combined with the lunar 100 it gave me a focused exploration of the moon. I also tried out various sketching techniques. It was a win all round.

Mike

Hi Kerry,

Your technique will work very well for lunar sketching, and also the paper you are using. I never do a completed sketch at the eyepiece - certainly not in pastel/chalk. I tend to do rough outlines, make notes and may be some detail for those interesting areas. Then re-do it all later. If you are not aware, there is the lunar 100 observing challenge which makes a wonderful sketching challenge and as you read up about the features you can learn up the moon geology/formation.  I certainly enjoyed locating and sketching this 'grand tour' - some are posted within the sketching section.

Have fun,

Mike

NGC 6503 is in Draco. The reason for posting this galaxy is because of its lonely position in space. It is a dwarf at just 30,000 lyrs across and is a near neighbour at 17 million lyrs away. It lies right at the edge of the Local Void ( a region about 150 million lyrs of no stars or galaxies). Its classification is SAcd - H11, LINER. Its black hole is being starved of material and so emits relatively little energy, hence the LINER designation. I read that our galaxy is slowly being pulled away from the Local Void, I do not know if 6503 is being pulled away as well - how sad to think of it all alone!!! There are some wonderful Hubble images of this galaxy. I was pleased to pick up some of the lumpiness of its appearance which coincides with H11 star forming regions.

Mike

Having visited the  Nova Cas 2021 I thought I would tweak the scope and go across to the nearby Bubble Nebula. I was rather surprised by how much I was able to pick up with a 7" scope and in less than 5 minutes. This nebula lies about 7000 lyrs away and the bubble is about 7 lyrs across. The bubble is formed by the mag 8.7 star - near to the left of the bubble. It is  large, young blue star about 4 million lyrs old. Its intense UV radiation is ionising the surrounding hydrogen to form H11. The bubble lies within a massive dust/gas cloud.

PS. ignore the 15@f3.5, it was STF 7"@ f6.0

After this I popped over to the Cats Eye Nebula but the result whilst OK is not worth posting.

Mike

I was given the heads up for this bright nova in Cassiopeia. It is about mag 8.0 - easy visual and via the camera. It is the bright star just up from centre. 

Mike

I recently blew the sensor with my puffer and it got rid of all the dust bunnies.

Mike

Hi Tony,

Good to have a post from you - was beginning to wonder if things were Ok.

I know it was not planned as such but I have often thought about trying my C11 at its native f10 and thought it would not be worth it. Your great results show that it is worth it..

PS - despite the promise of a gap I got just 30 minutes and clouded out by 8.30pm.

Mike

Arp 224 (NGC 3921) in UMA. This is thought to be a merger in process - the close up shot gives a hint of of two nucleus in close proximity. It lies about 275 million lyrs away. It has a starburst nucleus which is really no surprise as these two galaxies collide. Designation is (R') SA (s)O / pec. The R' indicating a pseudo ring - in however many millions of years it might well become a proper ring.

The Zwicky cluster - ZWCl 1148.6+5523 is centred on NGC 3921 and the various fuzz spots are galaxies at about 1 billion lyrs away. Down and to the left on the wider shot is another ZWCl (only the cluster edge in view) where the galaxies are a touch nearer at about 800 million lyrs away.

UGC 5055 (Markarian 114) in UMa.  One of those WOW moments as this galaxy appeared in the middle of its guardian stars . Designation (R') SBb (Sbrst) - not a true ring galaxy, just the appearance of one with those spiral arms turning back on themselves. 363 million lyrs away.

UGC  6334  in UMA.  This is a nice example of  a lenticular with no bar and an outside ring - hence (R) SO/a - now what does this mean? SO = lenticular where not sure if it has a bar or not (SAO=unbarred, SBO =barred), so I am assuming the /a might be indicating the preference for it lacking a bar?

PGC 31214 in UMa, is in the ring galaxy list as (R) Sab at a mere 919 million lyrs away! I was using the C11 for this shot so it was hard to pick up at mag 16.

Arp 143 in Lynx is a glorious mess, made up of NGC 2444  - SO (Ring A), merging with NGC 2445 - Im (pec) (Ring B). So we have a lenticular merging with Magellanic type dwarf, irregular galaxy. Along with the mess we get star forming regions in 2445 and two rings for the price of one.

NGC 3945 is found in UMA. I was thrilled to see this one pop onto the screen. This is bigger than the Milky Way at about 120,000 lyrs diameter and 68 million lyrs away.

It is a 'Saturn' look a like. My first thought was just how many rings have we here?  - (R) SBO^ + (rs) + LINER

NGC 3945 in Bootes is SB(rs)ab - LINER. rs = spiral arms coming off the end of the bar and forming a ring, which my shot picked up. There is the extra halo fuzz but this is too diffuse to be considered a ring?

As always it is worth the cold, wrecked sleep patterns.... to 'see' such sights.

Mike

Martin ,

I always enjoy the wider fov that you can give to our explorations. The colour adds that little extra something. I have just checked and I do have 4226 just in fov but no more detail than yours.

Mike

First up is an old friend, Arp 148 in UMa. Not the easiest of targets  to view. Its to the right of centre in the wide shot. It is a classic example of a galaxy doing a direct hit on another one. This pair are known as Mayall's object and lie about 500 million lyrs away. The offending galaxy has gone through the centre and is now heading out the other side. The shock wave creating the ring. Search out Hubble's image for this pair.

 Arp  336  in UMa - NGC 2685 takes us to the nightmare of galaxy designations - it is (R) SBO^ / pec (Sy 2) = outside ring, barred lenticular, messed up and very active nucleus (I do not know what the ^ stands for - any suggestions?). It is  an example of a Polar Ring (ring goes around the poles rather than around the ecliptic). It is also called the Helix galaxy. Two galaxies have collided causing one to wind around the other and creating a large ring of stars. The spindle in the middle is more or less a normal SO galaxy and in my shot you can get hints of the spiral pattern (helix) of the second one which has wound around the central  galaxy. There are some beautiful images on the web.

Seyfert 2 galaxies - black hole doing its thing at the centre with a bright nucleus (visual) and bright in the infrared, indicating much dust/gas.

.

UGC 6309 in UMA  is a lovely sight and is classified as SBc - barred spiral with arms not too tight but personally when I compare to standard galaxy pictures it looks more like SBb. Then there is the small matter of the ring or is it? I cannot find any official ring classification so I am suggesting it should be (R')SBb - pseudoring barred spiral..........

 PGC 38265 in UMa  is tiny and faint. I have distance data and nothing else. It lies 745 million lyrs away. Many of the fuzz spots in the left hand shot are in fact mag 18/19 galaxies.

Mike

This thread is for adding in your observations of RING GALAXIES.

Here is my somewhat basic understanding of ring galaxies.

Ring Galaxies – a galaxy with a ring (torus like structure) of stars. If only it was that simple. There seems to be various ways that a ring may form. About 50% of spirals have rings or partial rings and are most common in barred galaxies. The bar of stars sets up some sort of resonance pattern in the orbiting stars.

Three principle current theories of ring formation.

If the galaxy has a bar that becomes unstable as the galaxy rotates then the stars in the bar are migrated outwards to form a ring structure. (this is my simple version – dark matter and Byronic pressure are involved……)

Galaxy collisions such as in Arp 147 can result in a ring. If a galaxy passes straight through another galaxy then a ring is likely to form. A slanting blow, near misses are less likely to form a ring. As the smaller galaxy plunges into the bigger one, pressure wave ripple outwards (radially propagating density waves to be precise) collecting up the gas and compressing it at the same time and initiating star formation in a ring.

The third mechanism is where there is the formation of a very large spiral from the surrounding intergalactic medium. As material flows inwards and if conditions are right, rings of hot blue stars are formed rather than spiral arms.

The above is good enough for me. There are many technical articles out there for those who like the in-depth detail. Today I discovered an article suggesting that way back near the start of things there were magnetic wormholes and I quote

‘hypothesis that at least some of such rings could be remnants of relic magnetic wormholes. It turns out that magnetic wormholes may directly collect ring clumps of baryons in a process which is not based on the development of perturbations in dark matter component This means that the dark matter halo in such structures may have peculiar features, different from those observed in galaxies, In particular, in the case of wormholes the dark matter halo can be almost absent. This argument however does not work, if dark matter phenomenon has a pure topological origin, or it appears due to some extension of general relativity. The only stringent feature of such objects is the presence of a large-scale toroidal magnetic field. In the rest, the final form of the ring galaxy formed by a wormhole does not differ from that predicted by standard mechanisms. Indeed, upon the recombination epoch in the case when the wormhole collapses the ring may contain a more dense and old collection of stars (a small galaxy) in the center of the ring (as in the case of the Hoag’s object), or, when the wormhole expands further, the center part of the ring may remain empty.

See the link https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-8395-7

This link is at about my level with a nice simple video: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/one-ring-galaxy-to-bring-them-all-and-in-the-darkness-bind-them

This link https://medium.com/swlh/giant-ring-galaxy-existed-in-the-young-universe-ad65899126cd gives exciting info on the oldest collisional ring galaxy to be discovered - R5519 at about 10.8 billion years ago.

Ring Galaxy classification gets complicated.

An ‘r’ in the notation indicates a ring – no surprises there then!

(R) at the start indicates an outside ring, (RR) indicates two outside rings and (R’) indicates an outside pseudoring. A pseudo ring looks like a ring but isn’t. (r) indicates an internal ring.

However, rings can become lenses (‘L’ for outer or’ l’ for inner). I think rings evolve into lenses but I cannot find a simple definition of a lense. I am not even sure I could recognise a galaxy lense despite looking at various illustrations. My best guess is a ring is a well-defined structure and a lense is wider and fuzzy in appearance.

Now for the final complication, there are nuclear rings – these tend to be tight and bright around the nucleus, with the ‘n’ notation.

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept11/Buta/Buta6.html - will take you to more info on rings

try these for some light reading!!!!!! https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.08124.pdf  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1501.00454.pdf  https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.06589.pdf

I hope the above has got you excited to go out there and spot a ring or two.

PS – if you have any other info or spot mistakes in the above let me know and I can add it in/change things.

Have fun observing,

Mike

A list of ring galaxies to get us started.

Ring Galaxy.xlsx

Thanks Bill, I need to learn up the different asteroid types, as indicated in your info. I like the gif file.

Mike

Hi Martin,

I had just posted 3726 in my long report but here is a differently stretched shot with the jocular circles on it. I was totally focused in the other thread on the galaxy itself and did not even think about what else might have been caught. Interesting to see we picked up the same quasars and I had no idea there were PGC galaxies shining through 3726 (on the right hand side)

Mike

I will spend time re-looking at my shots and tweaking them in Jocular. Sometimes I will then put the snapshots into photoshop to brighten a bit or soften the images to give a better look to the shot - no more than about a minute to do this.

Mike

I get a buzz out of locating the distant faint galaxies, especially those SHKs and PCG groups but there is not much to see, so using a list Martin sent me I went to the near by bright galaxies for a session of fascination and wow factor in the UMa/CVn region.

M 106

An old favourite so what is new to learn?  Firstly distance measurements vary from 24 to 31 million lyrs away (24 seems to be the favoured distance). Its classification is SAB(s)bc: LINER Sy1.9. An intermediate spiral with a weak bar and arms not too tightly wound. LINER = low ionisation nuclear emission lines (I could not find a simple definition of this) and the Seyfert designation of 1.9 (normally a '2' is given ) is because it is a weak type 2 Seyfert galaxy - a weak AGN (active galactic nucleus).

My set up cannot fully capture the extensive halo so I zoomed into the central zone and played with the settings to show up the hint of a weak bar, dust zones and some star forming regions

NGC 4217  (another well imaged galaxy).

My left hand shot is trying for the 'pretty picture of the night' award. Ok then we can all see the edge on dust lane but I have never noticed the kink before. Also I had not appreciated that it is a likely companion to M106, even though it about 60 million lyrs away. Its classification is SAB sp: H11 - intermediate barred spiral with plenty of H11 regions. My close up just starts to show the well imaged frilly edge to the dust lane and the kink? 

NGC 4906 - this galaxy is a SAB(rs)c: H11. The (rs) means there are spiral arms coming off the ring - it is not a fully formed ring. My zoomed in shot shows a hint of a ring and the weak bar as well as the start of spiral arms, also star forming regions.

NGC 3949  is a SA(s)bc : H11 galaxy - not barred and plenty of star formation happening. Pleased to get some of the dusty regions, the spiral arms and star knots in the close up.

NGC 3985 - this is a delightful spiral dwarf, rather odd looking character!, hence the Sm (Spiral with one main arm as in the LMC galaxy). Other designations are SBm or SB(s)m - both these indicate the presence of a bar, which shows up in my close up shot. The spiral arm comes off one end of the bar.

NGC 4036  - this lenticular lies about 80 million lyrs away and has well defined irregular dust lanes. It is designated SO^- now what does that mean? It is an early type lenticular (what does that mean?). It is a LINER galaxy. Apparently about a third of all galaxies are LINERs and 75% of LINERs are E/SO galaxies, suggesting there is a link to age/star formation. This galaxy belongs to the LGC - 266 and includes NGC 4041, IC 758, UGC 7009 and 7019. No sign of dust lanes in my close up.

NGC 3726  - another barred spiral (SAB) but it has an inner ring, hence SAB(r)c : H11 and what a lovely sight it is. It is only about 85,000 lyrs across, so not huge and is about 45 million lyrs away.

The close up shows the bar, the ring and the star forming regions. I got carried away with zooming in

IC 2574  - the question I asked of myself is why have I not visited this beauty before? It is a SABm - my definition is 'a mess with a weak bar and no bulge' . The full designation is SAB(s)m : H11. It is really quite small (a dwarf galaxy) but being so close to us it appears large. I cannot see any hint of a bar,

Thank you Martin for suggesting these galaxies. 

After this crowd I went Ring Galaxy hunting - another post tomorrow.

Mike

Hi Martin,

Glad you were able to visit this area. I have just been comparing your view (8") versus  my view (15") - very little difference except on the time it takes to get this view.

Mike

I note you have two Dobs. If they are GOTO, then take a look at what I achieve with a 15" Dob and an Ultrastar guide camera.  Also take a look through the relevant EEVA threads - you will find your question is often asked and much advice given. 

Mike

VV 1529 in Draco was the highlight of the five VV galaxies in Draco that I looked at last night.

VV 1529 is the spiral beauty (NGC 4319) on the left but I just had to include the elliptical  of NGC 4291.  VV classifies NGC 4319 as PD? (distant pair). Charts show a second galaxy MKN 205 just below the barred core (where the obvious star? is) so hence the PD? notation.

Now for a spot of galaxy classification!! NGC 4319 is given by Skytools 4 as SBab - I agree with the barred galaxy notation but surely there is an inner ring, thus SB(r)ab is more accurate and is the correct morphological designation. It also has an active galaxy nucleus so the full designation could read as SB(r)ab, AGN. NGC 4319 is 80 million lyrs away and its supposed partner is in fact a Quasar at 1 billion lyrs away and in my shot it is the star that I mentioned earlier. In a paper from back in 1983 the article shows conclusively how MKN and 4319 were linked by a trail of luminosity (stars) - how wrong they were but of course they lacked the technological gear that we now possess.  

NGC 4219 is given the E3 designation (not perfectly spherical), and is a candidate for being AGN. It is about 86 million lyrs away. and may well have interacted with NGC 4319 at some point causing some of the disruption to the structure of 4319.

There is even more to excite in this shot. Just to the left of the NGC 4319 inner ring is a tiny fuzz spot (a LEDA gx - mag 18). Close to the right hand side of the fov is another mag 18 LEDA gx.