NGC7183

NGC 7183 is a peculiar red galaxy in southwestern Aquarius about 110 million light-years distant. It is well below my normal imaging area where seeing is poor and atmospheric dispersion a major issue. I had to try for it when I had a better than usual night (well what passes for usual this year). The dust lanes are what interested me especially the one coming in diagonally from the lower right side that obviously doesn't follow a spiral pattern. Actually, none of them do. Also, it is very asymmetric with a faint extended region to the southwest. Thanks to faint plume-like extensions I measure its size at about 150,000 light-years. That's one big galaxy. With nothing else in the field at its distance, I'm going to assume its distortion and odd dust is due to a rather significant galaxy it merged with in the not too distant past. I suspect with better resolution a lot of fine dust structure would be seen. It was discovered by William Herschel on September 23, 1786. It didn't make either of the Herschel 400 observing programs.

NED classifies it as S0+ pec. The plus sign indicating it has some characteristics of a Sa or SBa galaxy. That likely refers to the very vivid dust lanes. So vivid I was surprised it was listed as an S0 galaxy. Seligman apparently agrees classifying it as Sa pec? The NGC Project agrees saying Sa: but without the pec label. So much for the "exact" science of galaxy classification. The core of the galaxy is so bright The Sky plots it as a star. Most sources consider the galaxy as disturbed and list it has having 4 companions to the north and 1 to the south. I see 6 to the north and several more to the south. Only two have redshift data. That shows they aren't companions at all as they are some 4 times more distant at nearly a half billion light-years. The northern galaxy has two others, not listed at NED as galaxies in its spiral disk. Are they just background galaxies or members of the same system. Another pair of galaxies without redshift information lie closer to NGC 7183. I assume these two plus the two LEDA galaxies are the 4 others mention as companions. The southern "companion" is likely MRSS 601-107599 which also has no redshift data. Many others without redshift data are in the area and noted in the annotated image, including one seen through the southwest end of the galaxy as a faint blob. Is it a star cloud in the galaxy or really a distant galaxy?

Due to being so low dispersion elongated stars in the luminance frames. The color frames showed much less elongation due to covering a much smaller spectral range. This is why using RGB only is better when this low. But I have only a one hour window this low. It takes me two nights just to do the LRGB if everything goes perfectly. I'd need 4 or more to do it pure RGB so put up with wonky looking stars. Another issue working this low is the image is severely reddened. The only color image I found of it is at Seligman's sight made from the red and blue POSS plates. It shows the galaxy very blue. Even after correcting for the normal loss of blue at this altitude and adding in another 15% for good measure I get a very red galaxy. If I'd add enough blue to match Seligman's image everything would be blue. While no Sloan data for this field exists there is some NOMAD data which I used. Also, there's a quasar at 7.96 billion light-years with spectral data. I used these to try and correct for the blue loss. As mentioned that still didn't seem enough so added an additional 15% "to taste" as Robert Gendler calls it. Sill the galaxy is very red. Since everything else looks reasonable I'm going with this color balance.

The annotated image shows what NED calls a quasar group LQG 11 which they list as having 11 members. One quasar is at the position of the group. Where the other rest are I have no idea. There are 4 galaxies in the image with a redshift that puts them 480 million light-years away and three others at 1.71 billion light-years. These appear to be two related groups.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7183

NGC7184

NGC 7184 is a great spiral galaxy in southern Aquarius that is listed as a barred ring galaxy with a Low Luminosity Active Galactic Nucleus about 110 million light-years from us. It is also a huge spiral. I measure it at 200,000 light-years across.

It was discovered by William Herschel on October 28, 1783 and is in the second Herschel 400 observing program. The other major galaxy in the image is NGC 7180. It too is an LLAGN galaxy but is classified as S0 and is much closer at about 43 million light-years by redshift and 60 by non-redshift measurements. Its size is 20,000 to 30,000 light-years across depending on which distance you use. It too was discovered by William Herschel but on September 11, 1787, nearly three years after he found NGC 7184. There's some disagreement here however with some saying William never saw it and giving credit to his son John for finding it September 23, 1830. It's not in either of the H400 programs.

They are also the most southern galaxies I've been able to image with some clarity at almost -21 degrees. My usual cutoff is -15 degrees and that suffers quite a bit most nights. My skies this low are limited due to the wall of my observatory and trees I can't prune in any way even though I own them as they are in the shore impact zone. Also, my seeing this low is usually awful as fog rising from the lake greatly limits transparency and sucks all blue light from any but the brightest objects.

I lucked out in that this was a night of the best seeing this low I've had in the 12 years I've been observing here. Also, transparency wasn't as bad as usual but it still sucked out much of the blue light of dimmer objects. So much so fainter objects had no blue at all. If I could have had more time for color data it would have helped but I get only 100 minutes between trees without it being too low. My Meridian Tree prevents imaging an hour and a half either side of the meridian forcing low objects to be even lower.

While I had a heck of a time with color balance as blue was lost totally in fainter things, unusually weak in medium bright objects and only slightly bothered in bright objects. This meant I had to scale the color adjustment to take this into account. Even eXcalibrator had issues I've never seen before. So while I've said before "the color is suspect" I really mean it this time. I found only a few color images of either NGC galaxy in the image and none came close the same color balance. Especially for NGC 7180. All showed it either blue, yellow-white or somewhat orange. None showed the golden core and blue outer regions I ended up with but since color correction was applied by magnitude that may have had severe consequences. Those with -20 degrees objects high overhead instead of along the horizon as it is here may get reasonable results.

For all the color issues I was surprised it went as deep as it did. To the southwest of NGC 7180 is a galaxy that's 4.7 billion light-years distant and magnitude 21.9. Some nights reaching that high overhead is a challenge in 40 minutes of luminance data let alone only about 15 degrees over the lake thanks to my being unable to catch it near the meridian.

Why nearly all the galaxies NED had redshift data on were west of NGC 7184 I can't explain. I see as many to the east. Some survey may have ended at its right ascension I suppose. It is in the Zone of Avoidance so the Sloan Survey hasn't taken this part of the sky.

One asteroid is obvious near the right edge of the frame. Several others are in the frame but too faint for conditions. I can't even see them on the FITS stack.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7184

NGC7193

NGC 7193 is considered by some to be an asterism, others such as SIMBAD say it is an open cluster. But the only paper on it that I found says it is an OCR. That doesn't stand for Optical Character Recognition as my brain first thought. In this case, it stands for Open Cluster Remnant. After lots of deep reading the paper says; "We conclude that NGC 7193 is a 2.5 Gyr OCR composed by 15 confirmed members and 19 probable members and located at about 500 pc away from the Sun." It can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.00972

The age likely explains the lack of blue stars though it appears still somewhat too red. Located under the neck of Pegasus I'd not expect it to be dust reddened. I found only one color image of it and that agrees to my color. The group was discovered by John Herschel on October 2, 1825.

There's one galaxy in the image, IC 5160, an SB0 galaxy at just under 400 million light-years. It was discovered by Stephane Javelle on October 15, 1903. It too seems rather red so maybe there is some dust reddening this field. Though it may just be a red and dead galaxy.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7193

NGC7209

NGC 7209 is a type III1p open cluster in Lacerta discovered by William Herschel on October 19, 1788. It lies about 3800 light-years from us and is a bit over 400 million years old per WEBDA. It has two rather red stars near its center. Some amateur images call these carbon stars though I can't find anything to support this. My sources say the brighter is a K4 star while the fainter is a late G star. How late varies a bit. Neither are listed as being carbon stars. The Sky's database puts the K4 star at 5700 light years, SIMBAD says nearly 15,0000. Either way, it isn't likely a member. I can't find a distance for the G star in The Sky, Simbad puts it at 2100 light-years. I don't have error bars for either the cluster or star. I suppose it possible it is in the cluster as these distance determinations are usually pretty fuzzy. But it isn't a carbon star that I can find.

This cluster is in the original Herschel 400 list and thus was on my to-do list. When I went to process it I found all frames had a nasty reflection that at first fooled me into thinking it a nebulous patch near the cluster as it had interesting somewhat linear dark bands that were rather sharp-edged. Unlike most reflections that are rather fuzzy in detail. Still, I was unable to coax it out of any published image, some obviously quite deep. I found it nearly impossible to remove from the luminance data. It was far fainter in the color data, strongest in blue and nearly absent from the red. Even in the blue, it was faint enough I easily removed it. Thus, without a useable luminance, I just processed the 6 RGB images. That meant it doesn't go as deep as I normally do but considering the vast number of background stars cluttering the luminance frame that is actually a good thing. For so limited data it came out quite well. Though I'm not sure why my system decided to take this low priority object on what appears to have been a better than average night. Though from my latitude it was nearly at the zenith so in my best seeing part of the sky when this was taken.

My visual notes from June 14, 1985 agree with the image. They were made under very humid conditions with fair to poor transparency and read: "Large, bright, even but coarse cluster almost lost against a rich Milky Way background. This cluster stands out much better when I stopped the telescope down to 6". It will be lost in anything much larger than my 10" scope." Even limited to RGB data it is pretty well lost in this image with a 14".

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=none RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7209

NGC7212

NGC 7212 is a train wreck of galaxies under the neck of Pegasus. It consists of three galaxies which most sources say are interacting. I'll agree two certainly are but the third may be but it is little distorted and has no redshift value I could find so I can't place it in the vicinity of the other two. The only thing going for it that I can see is it has an odd dust lane south of its core that appears to cut the southern part of the galaxy off as if a galactic chainsaw hit cut it off. The two galaxies with known redshift are about 350 million light-years from us.

The two obviously interacting galaxies have a mash-up of tidal plumes. They are both heavily distorted by the interaction. The northern small galaxy has a dust lane at an angle to its plane. NED doesn't try to classify any of the galaxies but does show the main one as a Seyfert 2 galaxy. The NGC Project lists the main one as Sb while Seligman says Sb?. I find it odd no one gives it the pec label. The galaxy was discovered by Lewis Swift on October 2, 1886.

To the south of NGC 7212 is what appears to be a pair of galaxies. They may just be in the same line of sight or interacting. It's hard to tell. NED just identifies the pair with one entry as an UltraViolet Source with no further information.

Near the bottom of the image right of center is a short asteroid trail left by (84094) 2002 QB47 at magnitude 17.4. With nothing else with any useful information, I didn't prepare an annotated image.

A raw HST image of this train wreck can be found at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NGC_7212_hst_05479_606.png

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7212

NGC7217

NGC 7217 is a very strange galaxy in Pegasus. It has a huge core of old stars that show filaments of star clouds resembling arms. These grow faint then suddenly turn blue indicating the stars making up this outside area are all young hot stars. The filaments of spiral-like structure can be followed up to about 10 seconds of the very core of the galaxy. They cross this fainter region and keep going. This is a very strange structure. The outer blue region has caused the galaxy to be classified as a ring galaxy which is generally conceded to be wrong. It's just an illusion caused by the faint region between the old and young star regions. Why it has this construction isn't well known. The galaxy has an active nucleus and is a LINER class galaxy. I couldn't find a good distance estimate for it. Redshift indicates it is very near at about 30 million light years but at that distance redshift can be highly misleading. Still, it appears to be in the ballpark at least. This is one case when the Kitt Peak image of this galaxy isn't much better than mine. Sometimes their seeing isn't much better than mine here -- but that's rare. Note they show a distance of about 40 million light years but don't state where they get that figure.
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n7217.html

NGC 7217 was discovered by William Herschel on September 7, 1784 and is in the original Herschel 400 observing program. My entry with my 10" F/5 on July 10, 1985 under average conditions using 60x to 180x reads: "Nearly round galaxy, gradually brighter toward the core. Bright nucleus is seen only with averted vision. Beauty is best seen at 60x where it seems to sit in a beautiful rich star field. It must be greatly dimmed by dust in the Milky Way." I'm not sure that last comment is correct as I don't see that in my image. Seligman classifies it as Sb? while NED says (R)SA(r)ab;Sy LINER and the NGC project says simply Sb.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RG=4x10x3 B=3x10x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7217

NGC7223

NGC 7223 is a face on barred spiral in Lacerta about 200 million light-years away. It is part of a group of 18 galaxies known as the LDCE 1503 group. It would seem to qualify for Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies in two categories. It is a three-arm spiral and a better example of this than some in his atlas. It also has a nearby companion he likely would consider as a high surface brightness companion on an arm. The "companion" is Holm 788B. NGC 7223 is also Holm 788A. I found no distance estimates for Holm 788B so it is unknown if it is a true companion. To me, it appears to be more distant but then all galaxies in the image that have distance data are part of the group and thus at about the same distance as NGC 7223. It would be the lone exception. NGC 7223 is classed by NED as SB(rs)bc. The NGC project using a different classification system says SBc. It was discovered by John Herschel on September 6, 1834.

The other major spiral is UGC 11927. NED classes it as Sb. Its color is very different from NGC 7223. Below it is PGC 068169. Note that The Sky 6's database shows UGC 11927 as being PGC 068169. This is an error that had me confused for a bit. UGC 11927's PGC designation is PGC 68171. The Sky 6 hasn't heard of it.

CGCG 530-014 has two blue objects just below it. They don't appear to be stars. I can't tell if they are part of the galaxy or a background galaxy or galaxies.

The field being located near the Milky Was hasn't yet had its Sloan data entered in the NED database. This greatly limited the galaxies with any data. All listed in NED are labeled in the annotated image by name, even those without distance data.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7223

NGC7227

This field of galaxies a bit over a quarter of a billion light-years distant is rarely imaged by amateurs. I found only one color amateur image and only a couple more mono images. The main three galaxies form a triplet known at NED as UZC-CG 276. That stands for the Updated Zwicki Catalog-Compact Groups. It was searching this catalog that led me to this field. Near the center is NGC 7228 whose outer arms form a ring coming from the bar of an SBa type galaxy. Usually, a SBa galaxy has rather tight arms, not the wide spaced ones seen here. Makes me wonder if the outer faint arms were even seen when it was categorized. The redshift and Tully-Fisher distances are almost exactly the same, varying only at the 3rd decimal point. I can't recall seeing any that agreed this well. Thanks to its widely spaced but extremely faint outer arms I measure its size at 150,000 light-years making it a very large spiral.

The other NGC galaxy in the field is NGC 7227 to the west, it is listed as an S0. It seems to show some hints of spiral structure and has a redshift almost identical to that of NGC 7228. The third member of the group is UGC 11960 an Elliptical galaxy with a Seyfert 2 nucleus. Its redshift puts it very slightly closer but I suspect that's mostly due to relative velocity in the group and it really is at virtually the same distance as the other two. Besides being a Seyfert 2 galaxy it shows in radio to be a very extended S-shaped radio source. Both its Seyfert status and radio signature likely are the result of something it is still digesting.

LEDA 2133919 is too distant (angular distance) to make the cut for a compact group but may also be a true member with its redshift again due to high speed motion in our direction. More likely it is not a member. The group and its surroundings are too poorly studied to determine which is the case. Three other galaxies that are likely group members are at the top of my frame. They are at 260 to 270 million light-years distant.

The only other galaxy with redshift data is a flat galaxy, 2MFGC 16749 mostly off the top of my image. Only its southern end made it into my image. It has a greater redshift than the others indicating it likely is unrelated to the others at a distance of 324 million light-years about 40 million light-years beyond the two NGC galaxies. But it could just have a high relative velocity. I consider this unlikely, however.

This field is so poorly studied only these 8 galaxies have any redshift data that I could find. Many more interesting galaxies are in the field that too may be part of the group but with nothing more to go on it can't be determined which, if any are group members.

The two NGC galaxies were discovered by Édouard Stephan on September 1, 1879. How he missed the third member I don't know as he was using a 31" reflector. IC 5180 was found by Guillaume Bigourdan on September 21, 1890.

There's one asteroid in the image southwest of NGC 7227, (294725) 2008 BV40 with an estimated 19.1 magnitude by the Minor Planet Center. I get a magnitude of 19.3.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7227

NGC7234

NGC 7234 was discovered by William Herschel on October 16, 1787 but when his sister reduced his coordinates she made an error. She referenced a vacant piece of sky just below my image. Thus many catalogs list NGC 7234 as non-existent. Not finding anything at his dad's position as recorded by his aunt John Herschel found and recorded the cluster at its correct position on September 24, 1829 which he included in his General Catalog. Unfortunately, when John prepared his General Catalog in 1864 he missed the correction to the position of NGC 7234 by Arthur von Auwers published 2 years earlier. So his entry was given the designation of NGC 7235. Both were included in his General Catalog. When Dreyer prepared the NGC 25 years later he listed "both" clusters not realizing there was nothing at the position for NGC 7234 or that von Auwers had discovered it was John Herschel's cluster. So today some sources like WEBDA omit NGC 7234 but all include NGC 7235. It's not in either H400 program.

By whichever name you desire, the cluster is about 9,200 light-years distant in southern Cepheus less than a degree south of Zeta Cephei. WEBDA lists its age at 11.8 million years which makes it quite young. At that age I expected its stars to be blue rather than white but WEBDA lists it as being reddened by nearly a magnitude. I'd not think that sufficient to turn very blue stars white but apparently it is. The Sky shows the bright orange star as being only 65 light-years distant so it isn't a cluster member. The cluster's Trumpler classification is II3m. Even though discovered by William Hershel and a rather easy cluster visually it didn't make either of the Herschel 400 observing programs, possibly due to the position error for William's discovery of it.

14" LX100R @ f/10, L=4x10' (one version) RGB=1x10' (both versions), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7234

NGC7241

II Zw 174/NGC 7241 is a very strange edge on galaxy in Pegasus about 50 million light-years from us by redshift. The CGPG says of it: "Edge-on spiral, tremendous absorption lane and various large blue compact patches." I'd say that sums it up rather well. It has little central bulge so is rather flat. Not flat enough to make the Flat Galaxy Catalog but it is in the 2MASS version of IR strong flat galaxies (2MFGC 16794). Their flatness requirements are not as strict. The core is very strange with those blue blobs (star clusters I assume) floating around. They remind me of a neighbor who keeps seeing dust "orbs" in her flash photos and thinks they are ghosts of her deceased husband, a daughter and her pet dogs and cats. She's known around here as "The crazy lady down the way." She actually hires a medium to "communicate" with them. NGC 7241 was discovered by Édouard Stephan on September 3, 1872.

It's companion UGC 11964 is a featureless flat galaxy that did make the FGC as entry 2379. It too is about 50 million light-years away by redshift so a true companion. While I'd like to blame the oddities of II Zw 174 on interaction with it, it is so featureless I can't see that there's ever been any interaction. More likely the odd appearance of II Zw 174 is due to some hapless companion that strayed too close and is still being "digested" by the galaxy. However a very old paper, 1984 http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?1984BAAS...16..961G&db_key=AST&nosetcookie=1 says VLA data indicates there's a hidden companion behind II Zw 174. At that time the idea of galaxies feeding on each other wasn't well accepted. I couldn't find anything newer on it however.

NED classes II Zw 174 as SB(s)bc? pec. The NGC project agrees saying SBbc/P using its system. It is also in the Kiso Ultra violet excess Catalog (KUG 2213+189B). This would support a tremendous amount of star formation going on in the galaxy. UGC 11964 is listed by NED as simply Sd though some other sources say Sc. Considering how featureless it is (at least visually) I can understand the differences.

NED has no redshift data on any other galaxy in my image and only lists 13 others (all from the 2MASS) in the field though I see several hundred anonymous galaxies.

I see faint hints of scattered stars well outside the galaxy, especially to the southeast. I'd planned on taking a lot more data, and in fact, did take over twice what I used. Unfortunately, I didn't give up until long after I should have so ended up throwing out a lot. Thus I wasn't able to show but a hint of what I think should be seen to the southeast.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=5x10' RGB=2x10' (some rather poor), STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC7241