Despite a bright moon in the sky last night I was determined to take some images using my QHY9C on the 20″. Things didn’t go exactly to plan and I had some difficulties with guiding; mainly loss of guide star which I put down to some thin, high cloud. To eliminate other effects I slewed to a nearly bright star to see if I could actually guide on anything.
With the SBIG STV producing 26K ADU, Diadem in Coma Berenices at Mag 4.32 provided a good target and guided nicely while I took several 1 minute exposures. After stacking I noticed a faint object near to the star and loaded the image into Aladin (http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml) to identify it. The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) provided a name, KUG 1308+178 and some basic details: Spiral galaxy, Magnitude 16.5, major diameter 0.4′, minor diameter 0.2′.
Other images of this galaxy are few and far between but I did find one taken on the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt in 1950.
