accidental NGC 3949

[WaveSoarer]

It was a relatively clear night last night and we decided to have a go at imaging M109 as this seemed like an easy star hop from the star Phad in the plough. After getting set up I quickly aligned on what I thought was Phad, which looked a little more orange than I expected, and I slewed the telescope to where I thought M109 was meant to be. The background stars seemed to be about right but there was nothing obvious in view. I put this down to the less than ideal seeing. Anyway, back at "Phad" Mrs WaveSoarer and I focused up the SLR using our Bahtinov mask and I then slewed back to where I thought M109 should be. A long exposure didn't reveal very much but Mrs WaveSoarer did see a smudge at one edge of the SLRs rear screen. We got the smudge close to centre with the help of some more longish exposures and I then took a whole series of 60 second exposures. Before the clouds rolled in I checked the alignment of the scope, by viewing along the tube, and it was obviously pointing in the wrong place and, when Mrs WaveSoarer stacked these in DSS (flats and darks included), we got the attached result. It certainly isn't M109 and after some checks on Stellarium, having recognised that I'd actually initially aligned on Chi-UMa, and looking at Google images of possible candidates, it turns out that we'd found NGC3949. Not the greatest image really but an unexpected surprise.

I later did manged to align on Phad (very bright and blueish white as it should have been) after the cloud had lifted and sure enough M109 was fairly obvious and where it should have been through my trusty 20 mm EP. The seeing wasn't great but we managed to get a reasonable image before I nearly froze.

[Toxic Coolaid]

it always nice when an accident gives you a nice result. You don't have the feeling of wasted time. Last year I was trying to image the flaming star nebula and wound up shooting between it and NGC1893. This year I wanted to try and image the tadpoles in NGC1893. I remembered my mistake from before, and luckily I hadn't erased my data from last year. Instant data to process during this year of bad weather.

[mdstuart]

Its a great image. The galaxy looks great if you zoom in.

Thanks for sharing.

Mark

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[WaveSoarer]

Thanks Mark and Toxic Coolaid. Fortunately the M109 image looks quite a bit better than this. I'm still pleased that we got this one though as it allows us to explore what's possible.

[Gina]

Well done for not wasting a night - nice little galaxy

[Shibby]

All good fun though, right? And at the end of the day, you have a nice image of a rarely-imaged galaxy so good job!

[WaveSoarer]

Thanks Lewis and Gina. It was quite a thrill to get something unexpected and it was fun to do little bit of detective work to identify what we'd found. The region of the plough is very rich with galaxies and we could even see three faint smudges of other galaxies on the M109 image - need to identify those now.