The bright star on the left is HD8625, and the dark clouds surrounding have various designations (LDN 1251, LDN 1247, LM 397, 395, & 393). They are clouds of dust floating around our galaxy, waiting to be disturbed to be made into stars. This area is in northern Cepheus, about 15° from the north pole. For those of us well into northern hemisphere, this star never sets. However, these clouds of dust are far too faint to see with the eyes alone, and larger telescopes would show the darker areas as an absence of stars, to the visual observer. Deep images such as this reveal the size of the cloud.
There are two small galaxies in the image, one just above center, a bit left, PGC 166755--magnitude 15.97, about 112 million light years away. The other on the left, about half way up, just off the fish's nose, is PGC 069472, perhaps 72 million light years away.
This image is made from 16.25 hours of data from
Deep Sky West's FSQ.
No comments:
Post a Comment