>Richard,
>
>You might be thinking of NGC 6946 and NGC 6939 in nearby Cepheus.
>See
><http://www.hawastsoc.org/deepsky/images/cep/ngc6946.jpg>http://www.hawastsoc.org/deepsky/images/cep/ngc6946.jpg
>
>A classic near-far pair, if you can get enough FOV. Beautiful.
>
>\Paul Alsing
In addition to the nice juxtaposition with an open cluster, 6946 was
the host galaxy for supernova 2004et, which many of us looked at last
fall. Jim Solomon happened to image the galaxy a few days before the
supernova was discovered, and has a nice before and after image of
the galaxy on his his web page.
Try http://home.comcast.net/~solospam/ngc6946.html,
click on "full zoom", and then mouse over 6946 to compare the
prediscovery and discovery images of the supernova.
To make this more relevant to clusters, 6946 is also host to a
supermassive star cluster that is thought to be a young (15 million
year old) precursor to a globular cluster. This is also visible
through amateur scopes, and was discussed before on TAC after
CalStar observations in 2002 and 2003.
(See http://observers.org/tac.mailing.list/2003/Sep/0825.html and following)
--David Kingsley
Received on Mon Apr 18 15:11:06 2005
