NGC6946 is located on the border between Cygnus and Cepheus and is a fairly bright galaxy about 25 million light years away. It is dubbed the “The Fireworks Galaxy” due to the unusually high number of supernovae that have occured here – ten – that have been observed during the last century. Typically a galaxy would normally have one per century and it is not known why this galaxy has had ten times the average.
The galaxy is quite heavily obscured by dust within our own galaxy and this is probably the reason why it was not accorded the honour of a Messier catalogue number.
Image Technical Details
Imaged from my back yard in Nottingham, UK, during September 2020 whilst high overhead. I used my TEC140 refractor with Atik 460 CCD camera and Astrodon LRGB Generation 2 E series filters and a Ha (3nm) filter. Out in front of the filter wheel was an IDAS light pollution filter. MESU 200 Mount was guided with an off-axis guider. Transparency for the luminance was good but was poor for the RGB and Ha data.
Lum > 36 x 300s 1x1s ; RGB > 14 in each x 300s 2×2 ; Ha > 14 x 300s 2×2
Image capture in SGP and processing in PixInsight and Photoshop CC.
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