Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Ah yes, of course...I even suggested using Simbad   
Mike |
Exactly, and thanks for the suggestion as well. And for the benefit of others who may be wondering what we are talking (posting?) about, I shall explain.
There was one (of the many) background galaxies that caught my eye and I decided that I would hunt down the catalogue number for it. It sort of looked like a galaxy but I thought that it could have been a PN as well. See attached images for the location of the object. Having checked my usual resources (Sky Safari Pro, Stellarium etc.) I couldn't find it so following Mike's suggestion I ventured into SIMBAD.
SIMBAD, being a science based resource, does not have an overly intuitive interface so takes a little bit of nutting out to drive it. A good thing to do on a rainy day at a star party
. There are a number of search criteria that one can use to search for an object and the one that I finished up using was a location based search where you provide the coordinates and a search radius.
Using the approximate location of the object (taken from Stellarium) and a search radius of 5 arc minutes, SIMBAD presented a list of four objects which included one galaxy. Clicking on the link for the galaxy entry provided additional details and an image of the very object I was looking for - Voila!. We were very pleased with ourselves.
The galaxy itself does not seem to have a catalogue number apart from the reference to the 6dFGS sky survey and a position number. If you want to take a look at the output from the search query on SIMBAD,
click here.
Thanks again Mike for your suggestion, it was a good fun little project and a good thing to do on a rainy day at a star party