Polarissima Borealis (Can’t really see it, I just like the name)

Polar Area – Takumar 200 lens stopped down about 1/2 stop with filter rings(58 down to 49). 60 seconds at ISO 400

I was out last night mostly to work on focusing the Takumar 200mm lens, hoping to reduce chromatic aberration but I decided to image the polaris region to see if i could spot this beauty. In the middle of the highlighted circle above you can see for sure Gaia DR2 1152635154843863808, a magnitude 12 star and just up and to the right is NGC 3172. I can see it with the eye of faith but it’s tiny at 1X.7 arc minutes and low surface brightness at 13.7 mag/arcmin2

The plate solve below from astrometry.net is the only way I knew it was in frame then i tracked it down in stellarium.

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s