PGC009892

A galaxy of a different color --

Maffei 1 was originally cataloged as a nebula. It is SH2-191 in the Sharpless catalog of emission nebula for instance. It was recognized as a huge elliptical galaxy by Paolo Maffei in 1968 along with a nearby giant spiral Maffei 2. It lies only 0.6 degrees from our galactic plane. If in clear skies it would be a just visible naked eye galaxy. Maffei 1 is thought to be about 10 million light-years away in the constellation of Cassiopeia. The error bar for that is about +/- 1 million light-years. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/368339

Normally I see galaxies of this color only when they are several billion light years distant and thus reddened by that many light years of inter galactic gas and dust. Here I got the same color from only the dust along the plane of our galaxy.

While Maffei 1 was thought to be an emission nebula the blue reflection nebula northeast of the galaxy in my picture, ZOAG G135.91-00.47 was listed in the Zone of Avoidance Galaxy catalog about the same time Maffei was discovering the galaxy wasn't a nebula. It wasn't until 2003, thanks to the Midcourse Space Experiment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midcourse_Space_Experiment ) it was determined to be a nebula forming new stars. That put it in the MSE catalog as [KSP2003] J023709.98+594231.0. To the north northwest less than 2 minutes away is another nebulous patch. This one isn't as blue. The only thing I find in SIMBAD in the area is centered a few seconds of arc below the star that seems embedded in it. Simbad classes it as an HII source though it is mostly listed in catalogs for CO masers and other IR catalogs. It also made the Midcourse Space Experiment catalog as MSX6C G135.8914-00.4580. For an HII region it is an odd bluish color rather than HII pink. I suspect it is both a reflection and emission nebula but the reflection light outshines the H alpha pink.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RGB=4x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for PGC009892

PGC014241

UGCA 86/PGC 14241 is a nearby Im galaxy likely part of the Maffei 1 group of highly obscured galaxies. It is located only 1.5 degrees southeast of IC 342. One paper indicates UGCA may be tidally interacting with IC 342. It certainly is a distorted looking affair. Discovered first (it has been independently rediscovered a couple times since then) in 1974 it is described by the UGCA in 1974 as "...several regions visible on red POSS; probably connected; intragalactic object?" So at that time, it wasn't certain this was even a galaxy. Being so obscured its true appearance may be rather different from what is seen in optical images. Some areas are quite reddened by dust while others still somewhat blue. Are these blue regions less reddened or is the color difference real? I suspect both might be involved. NED has a wide range of distance estimates using various means. They range from 2.6 million light-years to 14.3 with a median value of 8.6 million light-years. The generally accepted distance to IC 342 is 10 million light-years which would also be the distance to UGCA 86 if it is interacting with it. Heavily obscured galaxies like this one are very hard to study! For example, NED shows the core object in the bright blue region in the southeastern part of the galaxy as VII Zw 009, a galaxy but then notes: "This may be part of the galaxy UGCA 086." The galaxy seems fairly large the part I can see in my raw data measures out at 9.7 minutes across. At 10 million light-years that is about 28,000 light-years across. It isn't as big as it looks being so close. Typical for an irregular galaxy so we may be seeing much of its extent.

The only other galaxy in the image worth pointing out is HFLLZOA L090. It is to the east-southeast of UGCA 86 and has a very large but faint red disk around a bright core region. Redshift puts it at 110 million light-years. That makes it only about 40,000 light-years across. How much we don't see due to dust in our galaxy blocking the view I don't know. NED classifies it as U whatever that means. I asked NED what they meant but never got a reply. Since I'm picking this one up at 11 times the distance of UGCA 86 it makes me wonder if UGCA 86 is all that heavily obscured or is HFLLZOA L090 a really bright galaxy that would be fantastic if not for being heavily obscured? The truth likely lies somewhere in between these two options.

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

Related Designations for PGC014241

PGC015439

With DDO 005 I seem to have entered my "Dark Period". Here's another one with little in the way of background galaxies. Though in the case of DDO 005 it was due to such poor conditions they didn't make it through the gunk of our atmosphere. In the case of UGCA 92, it is the gunk of our galaxy that is the culprit.

UGCA 92 is a member of the highly obscured Maffei group. It is located in Camelopardalis (a giraffe rather than a camel though I see neither in its pattern of faint stars) some 6.5 million light-years away. Distance to this obscured object is very difficult to determine. This is a very approximate value, In any case, it is very nearby. Redshift at such close distances is useless. In fact, it is blue shifted. NED has 6 different distance estimates listed which range from 2.6 to 10.1 million light-years with a median value of 6.5. It is classed as Im? which is an irregular of the Magellanic type, maybe. Just not enough is seen through the gunk.

NED lists 11 other galaxies in my field, none with even magnitude estimates let alone redshift data. All are from the 2MASS survey. Looking closely I see far more in the image. Apparently, they weren't bright enough at 2 microns to make the survey. The lack of galaxies is, of course, due to the heavy extinction in this part of the sky. The field isn't far from the Heart and Soul Nebulae to give you an idea how obscured this area is.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for PGC015439

PGC016636

PGC 16636 (aka PGC 16639) is a severely warped edge on spiral in western Orion just north of Eridanus about 190 to 200 million light-years distant. NED classifies it as Sb pec sp. It certainly is peculiar. The eastern (left) side of the disk is seen virtually edge on though the disk is unusually fuzzy. Usually when seen edge on the disk is sharply defined while this one sort of fades away but the main part is obviously very thin. The western (right) side, however, is tilted rather strongly so we see one face of the disk. Which way it is twisted (do we see the top or bottom side) I can't say. The dust lane takes a sudden jog as it leaves the bright region and heads onto the disk. It may be that rather than being twisted the west side is just a lot fuzzier without a defined plane. I rather doubt that but it would help explain why the dust lane continues across an apparently warped disk. I found not a single paper on this galaxy so have no idea what is going on here.

I'm still working an area poorly cataloged for galaxies. Only two others have redshift data. Both are seen in the cropped image. 6dF J0503238-025745 is 1.22 billion light-years distant. NED doesn't classify it. It is the apparent face on disk galaxy below the eastern end of PGC 16636. A small galaxy is just east of it (2MASX J05032490-0257494). While most of the other galaxies in the image aren't listed at NED that one was. The other galaxy with redshift data is LEDA 3080778 at the very bottom of the cropped image. NED puts it at 1.20 billion light-years. It may be related to the other distant one. I find no other information worth mentioning on the rest of the field.

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

Related Designations for PGC016636

PGC016957

UGCA 105/PGC 016957 is a galaxy in the Maffei 1 group. It is located in Camelopardalis. The Maffei 1 group is thought to be about 10 million light-years away. Several distance measurements for UGCA 105 put it about 11 million light-years away. NED classifies it as Im while other sources say Sm. My image appears to support the Sm classification. The field was very difficult to process because of the 6th magnitude star, SAO 13413 to the northwest and 8th magnitude SAO 13423 just to the southeast of the galaxy. These cast strong but uneven glaring artifacts over the image. Also, the field is full of faint nebulosity. Separating glare from real signal was difficult. I likely left in some artifacts. The galaxy is heavily obscured. I was surprised at the very blue outlying regions. I'd expect them to be reddened by all the dust. Could be they are mostly artifacts or reflection nebulae though they appear to hint at a spiral pattern of outlying arms of the galaxy. The core appears an off color for most galaxy core regions. Conditions were rather good for this image so I'd expect the color to be reasonably correct.

I suspect this galaxy would be quite spectacular if we could actually see it without our galaxy's dust obscuring the view. This was taken on my best fall night. I can't blame the weather for hiding it, it is all our galaxy's fault.

Due to all the obscuring dust few other galaxies appear in the image. Those that do have no significant data at NED so no annotated image was made.

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

Related Designations for PGC016957

PGC017588

MCG +08-11-002/PGC 017558 is a galaxy in northern Auriga on the eastern edge of the Milky Way so rather obscured. It is about 250 million light-years distant. Without good photometric data on the stars, even eXcalibrator had little to go on for removing the reddening of the dust. I sort of adjusted until the quantity of red and blue stars seemed about right. The galaxy is still quite red. More on that in a bit.

NED lists it simply as a spiral and a LIRG (Luminous Infrared Galaxy). I'd say it is a very disrupted spiral. While LIRG aren't necessarily red many are. What the LIRG label often means is the galaxy has lots of dust warmed by starburst level activity hidden behind the warm dust. In this galaxy, the activity is thought to be the result of the merger of two galaxies in the recent past. The resulting mess has a diameter of about 60 million light-years with hints of faint plumes (I need a lot more time to verify these) that may extend about twice this distance.

I've included an HST image of the galaxy rotated to match my north up orientation and image scale of my 0.67" per pixel cropped image. This shows the added resolution obtained by working outside our distorting atmosphere. The article it was taken from with the full resolution HST image with north to the left is at: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0810bl/ . The HST image isn't as reddened as mine. This is likely due to their choice of filters in that they used a photometric deep blue filter 435nm and an Infrared I band filter (814nm) and averaged the two to make a pseudo green.

Being in the Zone of Avoidance NED had no distance data on any other galaxy in the field so no annotated image was prepared.

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

Related Designations for PGC017588

PGC036506

NGC 3846A/UGC 06706 is a low surface brightness blue galaxy located in the bowl of the big dipper about 2 degrees northwest of Phecda at a redshift indicating a distance of about 74 million light-years. A single non-redshift measurement says 82 million light-years. It is classified as SB(r)m: and I measure its longest dimension at 53,000 light-years including the huge plume to the northeast. Without the plumes, it is about half that size. While it is listed as NGC 3846A, NGC 3846 is a full second field north of my frame. I'd not have expected it to be that distant. Also, it is nearly 450,000 light-years distant so 6 times further away. They aren't related in any way.

Also not related is the apparent companion to the west MRK 1452. It is 310 million light-years distant and larger at 75,000 light-years by my measurement. While unrelated it forms a pair known as VV 320. It is a starburst barred spiral classed as SBc. The core is surrounded by what looks to be a "Saturn-like" ring with the arms coming off the ends.

The galaxy or is it galaxies that really interest me are listed at NED only by position in the Sloan survey as SDSS J114339.35+550003.9 and SDSS J114339.95+550000.5. The former forms the head of a "comet" with the latter being a slight brightening in the southern edge of the tail just behind the former galaxy. I can't say if it is really a second galaxy or a faint star cloud in the tail. Is ASK 237743.0 involved? It is a Broad Line AGN which indicates its black hole is actively feeding. This could have been triggered with interaction with the other galaxy but with no redshift data for the "comet", there's no way to know. Certainly, a dense galaxy like ASK 237743.0 could tear apart a loose spiral creating a mess without much harm to itself so I suspect its possible though if the brightening behind the "head" is a second galaxy they could have torn each other apart to make the comet without help from the other galaxy. I don't expect this to be studied for some time.

I had a heck of a time capturing this one. A bright star off the right-hand side was sending all sorts of nasty ghosts into the frame. Whenever I put NGC 3846A anywhere near the center those ghosts ruined things. Normally a one minute move solves these but solve one and two cropped up. I felt like I was fighting Hydra. Finally, this low position worked. That almost cost me the comet-like galaxy. I've had much brighter stars out of frame that caused far fewer problems. I don't know why this one was such a pain to deal with.

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

Related Designations for PGC036506

PGC045372

UGC 8201/PGC 045372 is a Magellanic irregular dwarf galaxy that belongs to the M81 galaxy group. Measurements of its distance vary around 15 million light-years. Assuming that distance it is about 21,000 light-years across its longest diameter. It is very blue indicating its stars are quite young, yet it seems to contain little gas and dust from which it could make stars. This is a rather common problem with blue dwarf galaxies that still hasn't been understood. I see no HII regions in my image. I see some red fuzzy things in the HST image but they look more like reddened distant galaxies rather than HII regions. No Halpha was used for the HST image which was made in near IR and green light. The reason for the image was to determine its distance using the Tip of the Red Branch method. That came out with a distance slightly less than 15 million light-years. You can read more about it here: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1510a/ I see several apparent globular clusters around the galaxy's edges in the HST image at full size.

The field is full of distant galaxies, galaxy clusters, candidate quasars and likely quasars. It also contains one X-ray galaxy that is also visible in ordinary light. It is labeled XG in the annotated image. UvES objects are all candidate quasars with only photographic redshift. While photographic redshift can be a good distance indicator it also can lead to some very incorrect results. Over time I've watched many candidate quasars with large photographic redshifts turn out to just be ordinary stars in our galaxy with odd spectra leading to the erroneous result. So consider these as rather questionable Two candidates are seen through UGC 8201. Though several sources list them as star clusters in the galaxy rather than distant objects. In the HST image, the eastern one looks like a galaxy while the western one is star-like. I consider their status as quasars as circumspect. I marked them anyway.

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

Related Designations for PGC045372

PGC053126

PGC53126 is a ring galaxy in northeastern Virgo about 390 million light-years distant. It is classified as Sab with no mention of the ring that makes it look a lot like Hoag's object. Though there's a hint that the ring is really two spiral arms that do connect to the inner bright area so the ring isn't truly separate from the rest of the galaxy as it is in Hoag's object. I had this one on the to-do list for years but never researched it until now that I had taken it. Turns out there's virtually nothing on it, unlike Hoag's object. Very frustrating. I measure its size at 92,000 light-years.

Conditions were poor as they have been what few nights this spring I could even attempt to take data. I'm rather suspect of the color data as haze layers were coming and going that caused eXcalibrator to really have to adjust color balance far more than I've ever pushed it. Green, the least needed color seemed rather unhurt by the haze while the other colors were very weak in comparison.

When I centered on PGC 53126 I saw NGC 5775 and 5774 off the frame to the east so moved the center west to move them into the field. But I failed to realize that I also needed to move south a bit to catch all of NGC 5774. At least I caught the two IC galaxies in the bottom part of the image. These galaxies are rather normal looking. It's IC 1070 below the two NGC galaxies that looks a lot like an exclamation point without the lower dot. it is likely a member of the same group as the two NGC galaxies, just much smaller at only a bit under 20,000 light-years in length. NGC 5774 is almost 100,000 light-years across thanks to hits faint drawn out arm on the east side. This is likely due to interaction with NGC 5775 which appears a much more massive galaxy thus less disturbed by their interaction. It is only slightly larger in diameter (at least what we can see of it) at just over 100,000 light-years.

NGC 5774 was discovered by Bindon Stoney on April 26, 1851. The much brighter NGC 5775 was discovered 65 years earlier by William Herschel on May 27, 1786. It is in the second Herschel 400 observing program. Unfortunately, my notes from that got lost in our move to Minnesota nor did I log it otherwise.

IC 1066 and IC 1067 have a redshift similar to the two NGC galaxies so are likely part of the same group. I measure 1066 at about 34,000 light-years in size with 1067 being 53,000 light-years across. They were discovered by Stephane Javelle on May 28, 1891.

There are many very distant galaxies in the image but due to lousy transparency many are just so faint I didn't try to annotate them. Picking up only those brighter than 21st. magnitude. Under good transparent skies, I can easily point out galaxies a full magnitude fainter. I did label an Emission Line Galaxy that barely shows in the TIFF version but is very difficult in the lossy compression of the JPG image. It is right at 22 magnitude with a redshift of 7.7 billion light-years look back time.

There are several star-like objects labeled as UvES which stands for Ultraviolet Excess Source. These are candidate quasars with only photographic redshift calculations which can be very wrong. Thus they remain only possibly at extreme distances and thus quasars. Still, I find most that have been fully examined since I started noting such objects, turned out to be real quasars so these too likely will prove real quasars once the full data is obtained.

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

Related Designations for PGC053126

PGC054617

VV 705 also known as PGC 54617 among other designations, is a pair of colliding galaxies in northeastern Bootes about 550 million light-years distant. Both galaxies have bright blue tidal tails. The northern galaxy's tail curves around then across the region where the two are merging to come out the other side a short distance. The tails start bright blue but when they suddenly fade turn slightly red in color. Do these tails represent their path to the train wreck that is happening? Not being able to see the tails in three dimensions it is a bit hard to explain them. Are they similar to those of the Antenna galaxies just seen at a different angle and at a much greater distance? I measure the combination as being about 133,000 light-years across so these aren't very big galaxies made even smaller by their over half billion light-year distance.

Some sources claim it is made up of three galaxies but that is clearly not the case as seen in this HST image: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic0810bw/ .

The annotated image shows many very distant faint galaxies but few have redshift data at NED so aren't annotated. There were almost as many galaxy clusters as galaxies listed by redshift at NED. The galaxy anchoring the cluster with 12 members at a photographic redshift of 4.41 billion light-years look back time is listed at NED as being of magnitude 22.0. Not bad for only 40 minutes of luminance data. Many far fainter are visible but not finding many magnitudes listed for the field I don't know how faint it goes. The field was very near my zenith when imaged which helped it go deep by limiting atmospheric extinction to the bare minimum.

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

Related Designations for PGC054617