Spiral galaxy NGC6946

About this image

About this image
This is a two-minute exposure taken on the night of September 26th 1994 (UT of observation 27/09/94:06:30) with the 1k detector. This photograph shows a region 200 arc seconds square. The brightness of the image has been converted to color (a technique called pseudo-color) using a simple orange/red-shading-to-white transformation, purely to make a more attractive picture. Sky conditions during this phase of the commissioning were not ideal, and this image has a "seeing" measurement (average FWHM of several stars) of over 1.1 arc seconds.

About this object
NGC 6946 (Arp 29) is a face-on SAB(rs)cd galaxy in the constellation Cygnus. This classification refers to the presence of a small core with multiple well-defined arms (cd), with a poorly-developed bar across the middle (AB) and an inner confused ring (rs). Nearly twenty million light-years from Earth, it is over seventy thousand light-years across and more than fills this picture. At least one supernova has been observed in this galaxy.

Location: 20 33.8 +59 59 (1950.0)

More: galaxies page, spiral galaxies page, WIYN galaxies page, WIYN spiral galaxies page.

Minimum credit line: WIYN/NOAO/NSF

Downloadable versions:
400 x 400 121kb 8 bit false color GIF (on this page)
753 x 753 572kb 8 bit false color TIFF
1024 x 1024 1.0Mb 8 bit B&W TIFF
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