NGC 2146

[tomato]

Last night I was trying to image away from a 93% illuminated moon so had a go at an interesting looking galaxy NGC 2146 in Camelopardalis. This 156 x 2 mins with the Esprit150/IMX571c dual rig. I set out to capture twice this amount of data but for some reason my usually reliable method of setting the dome rotation rate to keep the scopes aligned with the open aperture went awry after a couple of hours, so I imaged the inside of the dome for half the session.

The annotation script in PI did not identify the object circled in purple. It looks like a galaxy but has two bright cores, I presume one is a faint foreground star.

Thanks for looking

 

[Rodd]

Nice. The moon is tough. Galaxies are bright, though.  Looks pretty good!

[wimvb]

Very nice!

Here's the mysterious galaxy, I believe

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=2MASS J06213825%2B7813105

 

Edit: no, that's not it. It doesn't turn up in aladin either

Edited November 7, 2022 by wimvb

[tomato]

Thanks, there does look to be some ‘fuzziness’ running at 45 degrees to the core, which is what made me think it was a galaxy. It’s quite large though, so I would have thought it would feature in the more prominent catalogues.

[markse68]

according to skysafari there are 2 ngc2146’s with quite large separation. Which is weird! Could it be the 2nd one? Edit- no that’s the bigger one labelled PGC18960

Mark

Edited November 7, 2022 by markse68

[gorann]

I really like the image and I think that main galaxy is new to me. A gentle touch of the new NoiseXTerminator could alleviate the effect of imaging the obsy wall half night😉

[gorann]

PS. You seem to have caught another unidentified faint fuzzy just below PGC2775989.

[wimvb]

4 hours ago, tomato said:

Thanks, there does look to be some ‘fuzziness’ running at 45 degrees to the core, which is what made me think it was a galaxy. It’s quite large though, so I would have thought it would feature in the more prominent catalogues.

It is a galaxy, snd it’s a bit strange that it’s not in any galaxy catalogue. So let’s name it tgc 1 (Tomato Galaxy Catalogue, 1st entry).

[gorann]

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

It is a galaxy, snd it’s a bit strange that it’s not in any galaxy catalogue. So let’s name it tgc 1 (Tomato Galaxy Catalogue, 1st entry).

Wow, Tomato, aka Steve, has found a new galaxy, with a little help from his friends👍😁 What about the fuzzy I spotted in his image Wim?

Edited November 7, 2022 by gorann

[tomato]

Wow guys! Surely galaxies as prominent as these ones have been catalogued somewhere? I get how tenuous nebulosity may not have been categorised, but galaxies are distinct objects, much easier to identify and label.

@gorann, it has had a dose of NoiseXterminator already, at 70% Noise reduction, 40% detail. I think what has created the horrible mottled coloured background is me boosting the Chrominance level after the noise reduction was applied, in an effort to improve the appearance of the galaxy when zoomed in, in hindsight not a good idea.

I have got to the bottom of what went wrong with the dome aperture tracking, I took a measurement of the Azimuth change in Stellarium at about 20:00 hrs, with this object being so close to the celestial pole later in the night the Az motion stops and then goes retrograde...oops. Looks like I will be modifying the dome control software to accommodate this.

[tomato]

True to form, here is me posting another rendition, hopefully with an improved background.

[Paul M]

TGC1 does show in MAST imagery as shown here in HNSKY. 

NED comes up with a few objects in the area but not this galaxy. It certainly show some structure. Looks like an interesting galaxy so someone, somewhere must have something on it.

[ONIKKINEN]

1 hour ago, tomato said:

True to form, here is me posting another rendition, hopefully with an improved background.

This one does look a bit better. Try desaturating the background with a selection on everything but the signal parts, would probably get rid of the RGB noise that remains.

[wimvb]

I checked for any galaxies in Vizier in this area, and found several that are not in your image, but not one correspondig to TGC 1. Weird, because your candidate isn't that faint, and DSS shows more detail than in your image.

[wimvb]

5 hours ago, gorann said:

Wow, Tomato, aka Steve, has found a new galaxy, with a little help from his friends👍😁 What about the fuzzy I spotted in his image Wim?

2MASX06155357+7812021

From the 2MAS extended catalogue

The 2MASS Extended Catalog (2MASX)

It's also in GAIA DR3 (GAIA Data Release 3)

[gorann]

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

2MASX06155357+7812021

From the 2MAS extended catalogue

The 2MASS Extended Catalog (2MASX)

It's also in GAIA DR3 (GAIA Data Release 3)

Good, so we only have one mystery galaxy then!

[wimvb]

20 minutes ago, gorann said:

Good, so we only have one mystery galaxy then!

We have one less. 😁