Debbie & I spent the last (4) nights at CalStar, an end-of-summer star party held in very nice skies 40 minutes northwest of Paso Robles, California. As always, it is great to gather with lots of long-time astro-buddies and share both the skies and their company at this very casual and laid-back event. My observing program this week was also casual and laid-back, and I had no prepared observing program whatsoever. On one night I just pulled out the Pocket Sky Atlas, turned to the “15h to 18h” ‘slice’ and just started near the pole, observing objects in turn, including both old familiar objects and new ones, as I moved south. I was spending a lot of time on each object, trying to tease as much detail as possible from each, not being in any particular hurry.
Before too long I arrived at this week’s OOTW, NGC 6217, in Ursa Minor. It lies about 67 million light years away and is less than half the size of our Milky Way. A little internet research reveals that it is also designated as Arp 185, and is in the Arp category of “Galaxies (not Classifiable as S or E) with Narrow Filaments”, although it sure looked to be a spiral galaxy to me!
Using my new Obsession 18" f/4.2 UC, at first with my faithful 13mm Ethos (151X), which showed this galaxy to be fairly bright, and it appeared to be a bit smaller than its stated size of 3.0’ X 2.5’. It has a bright stellar core and just a hint of both a central bar and spiral arms. Changing to a Nagler 7mm (281X) substantially improved the view, and now the bar is obvious, and it sure looks like there is a star smack in the middle of the galaxy! There is an arm emanating from each end of the bar, although one of them, on the north end, is much stronger than the other, which also seems to be much shorter.
The Hubble photo shows NGC 6217 in all of its glory, showing us that it is also a starburst galaxy, which means it is undergoing a very high rate of star formation, and is loaded with bluish SSC’s (super star clusters) and pinkish star-forming emission nebulae. What a grand site this is!
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