NGC 6946 The Fireworks Galaxy
NGC 6946 The Fireworks Galaxy
NGC 6946 (also known as the Fireworks Galaxy or Caldwell 12) is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy with a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group. but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster.
Discovered by William Herschel on 9 September 1798, this well-studied galaxy has a diameter of approximately 40,000 light-years, about one-third of the Milky Way's size, and it contains roughly half the number of stars as the Milky Way. It is heavily obscured by interstellar matter due to its location close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way, with a dimming of ~1.5 magnitudes. Due to its prodigious star formation it has been classified as an active starburst galaxy.
(Wikipedia.org)
Technical Information for This Image
This image was captured on a TPO Ritchey-Chretien 6 inch telescope with 1370mm FL and an F9 speed. A ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera was used at the prime focus of the telescope and was set to a Gain of 120 and a Bin 1x1. 58 exposures of 120s each were taken under the supervision of Astrophotography Tool (APT) software. Guiding was done using an Orion 50mm guide scope coupled to a ZWO ASI183MC camera. PHD2 auto-guiding software kept the entire setup on target for the 116 minutes of capture. Polar alignment was done with Sharpcap Pro. Post processing of the image was done with Pixinsight software with Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud software putting the finishing touches on the image and translating it to the JPG format for uploading to Flickr.
NGC 6946 The Fireworks Galaxy
NGC 6946 The Fireworks Galaxy
NGC 6946 (also known as the Fireworks Galaxy or Caldwell 12) is a face-on intermediate spiral galaxy with a small bright nucleus, whose location in the sky straddles the boundary between the northern constellations of Cepheus and Cygnus. Its distance from Earth is about 25.2 million light-years or 7.72 megaparsecs, similar to the distance of M101 (NGC 5457) in the constellation Ursa Major. Both were once considered to be part of the Local Group. but are now known to be among the dozen bright spiral galaxies near the Milky Way but beyond the confines of the Local Group. NGC 6946 lies within the Virgo Supercluster.
Discovered by William Herschel on 9 September 1798, this well-studied galaxy has a diameter of approximately 40,000 light-years, about one-third of the Milky Way's size, and it contains roughly half the number of stars as the Milky Way. It is heavily obscured by interstellar matter due to its location close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way, with a dimming of ~1.5 magnitudes. Due to its prodigious star formation it has been classified as an active starburst galaxy.
(Wikipedia.org)
Technical Information for This Image
This image was captured on a TPO Ritchey-Chretien 6 inch telescope with 1370mm FL and an F9 speed. A ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera was used at the prime focus of the telescope and was set to a Gain of 120 and a Bin 1x1. 58 exposures of 120s each were taken under the supervision of Astrophotography Tool (APT) software. Guiding was done using an Orion 50mm guide scope coupled to a ZWO ASI183MC camera. PHD2 auto-guiding software kept the entire setup on target for the 116 minutes of capture. Polar alignment was done with Sharpcap Pro. Post processing of the image was done with Pixinsight software with Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud software putting the finishing touches on the image and translating it to the JPG format for uploading to Flickr.