M94—a strange looking galaxy

M94
M94 [NGC 4736]
By Steve Crouch

I’ve had this data for M94 hanging around a while and wasn’t going to process it because I thought it was pretty poor quality. Anyway I employed the usual astrophotographic data manipulation techniques and came up with something that didn’t look too bad although it would have benefited from a lot more data. Of course you have to remember that this is only a small telescope.

This could be one of the last images from the Arizona telescope as my access is very infrequent now. I can’t complain though because I’ve had a good run.

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NGC 6559—Does this have a nickname?

NGC6559
NGC 6559

By Jonathan Powles

I was exploring Sagittarius over the last couple of nights, as you do, and I pointed the scope at what Skytools 3 tells me is a patch of nebulosity NGC 6559, and started to take some photos.

I was totally blown away by what I was seeing: bright and faint emission nebulosity; bright blue and also some yellow reflection nebulosity, wonderfully intricate dark dust lanes … this little patch of sky has it all.

Anyway, my question is this: does it have a name? A nickname?

It seems extraordinary that little blue and grey smudges get grand labels like “Ghost of Jupiter” and “Black Eye Galaxy” (another one I imaged last night), but that this visual and astrophysical wonderland just gets an NGC number.

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