Well, the New Mexico monsoons ended and here's an image of NGC 6946, the "fireworks" galaxy, a face-on spiral galaxy in Cepheus. ?Despite having a stellar population of only about 1/2 that of our Milky Way, it has a high rate of new star formation and is classed as an active starburst galaxy. ?The "fireworks" sobriquet stems from its production of 10 observed supernovae in the past century, roughly 10x as many as that of the Milky Way. ?Various "peculiar" objects associated with the galaxy have attracted the attention of astronomers over the years, and two of them can be seen in this image. ?"Hodge's object" is the name given to the bright blue object at the 11:00 position and the "red ellipse" appears at the end of the long spiral arm at the 1:00 position. ?Hodge's object has recently been conjectured to be an interacting dwarf galaxy superimposed on the disk of NGC 6946, and the red ellipse may be some kind of super bubble or very large supernova remnant - it is huge by any standard.? This rendition intentionally corrected for the reddening of the galaxy from dust in our galaxy - with an "as-seen" color balance, the colors in the spiral arms are very subdued.

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Data capture occurred over a 3-night period in September for a total LRGB integration of 18.3 hours.
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Thanks for looking,
Bruce W.