UGC05101

UGC 5101 is another one Arp overlooked. It has what he'd call a jet going to the west. I don't know what he'd call the plume that arcs partly around the galaxy and seems unrelated to the "jet". It is quite likely both features are the result of a merger or mergers in the past. Some papers say one merger, others two. I'd favor the idea it has merged with two each creating its own plume as it was ripped apart. It is in Ursa major about 8 degrees south of M81 and 540 million light-years away. Though one looping behind the galaxy could account for both plumes with there really being only one partly hidden behind the galaxy.

I used one of my very rare nights of seeing sufficient to work at 0.5' per pixel in order to get as much detail in this galaxy as possible. The posted image, however, has been reduced to 0.67" per pixel as the night just wasn't as good as I'd hoped. Also, to keep bandwidth within reason it has been cropped considerably to about 24.7 minutes wide minutes from the original 33.7 minutes. Height was left at my normal 22.5 minutes.

The annotated image has 12 probable quasars with a half dozen more cropped out. Arp believed (still does from reports I've gotten) that quasars were not distant objects like their redshift indicated but were ejected from active galaxies like UGC 5101. He'd have loved all the quasars around it if he had known at the time. His idea was the redshift increased with time from their ejection from the galaxy. So those nearby would have low redshifts while those further away higher redshifts. He had to invent strange physics to make this work. His fixation on the near crackpot physics got him kicked off the 200" scope.

Those marked UvES are Ultraviolet Excess Objects not yet confirmed as quasars but what else could have such a redshift and still be bright enough to pick up in a 14" scope? Well, they could be stars in our galaxy with spectra that is fooling photometric filters into seeing a redshift that isn't there. Though I've found most NED lists as UvES objects turn out to be true quasars. One is a strange X-ray object. It is toward the west side of the image and fully labeled so you can look it up at NED if you wish. Its position is vague. The only object within its rather generous error circle that appears to be the object is the one I marked. In the Sloan image, it is made up of several different bright colors, very strange indeed. Only one other object was within the error circle and it, too faint for my system, looked like an ordinary star in the Sloan image. Due to the uncertainty, it carries a question mark label.

The other questionable object is at the top of the image left of center. There is an odd blue galaxy made up of two condensations. One to the north being brighter than the one to the south. There's nearly a hole between them creating a near ring-like structure. I was wondering what NED would have on it. Nothing it turned out. It does show an object at about the position of the "hole" but lists it as 21st magnitude and is listed as a near point source. Obviously, the blue object is far brighter than that and far larger in angular size. Even the Sloan image showed no point source at the listed position. It remains an unknown.

The small cropped image is full size, 0.5" per pixel. The other two are reduced to 0.67" per pixel.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x20'x1, RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for UGC05101

UGC05189

On November 3, 2010 SN 2010jl was seen in UGC 5189a. I imaged it on the 11th low in the east. Dawn came too fast and I missed getting any blue data but decided to process it anyway creating a pseudo blue out of the red and green data. It looked reasonably correct but all I saw were mono images. I had no idea how well it worked. Later I saw Adam Block's image of it that showed I got the colors surprisingly right. Replacing a missing green is rather easy but replacing blue with nothing further up the energy spectrum is more difficult. This was done nearly 8 years ago. I'm not sure I remember how I did it.

On February 19, 2012 I decided to shoot it again to get a better image of the galaxy. This one is a Jinx. Looking at the data when I processed it a few days ago I was shocked to see clouds had made a mess of it. Two of the luminance frames were nearly totally lost to clouds and the color frames were similarly hurt severely, especially the red which had nasty halos around brighter stars enlarging them greatly. I was about to can the whole thing when I noticed the supernova was still there even though 15 months had passed. The data is mostly weak which prevented me from getting much detail though seeing was excellent. The brighter parts of the galaxy where the SN are located were the only parts to come through with a significant signal to allow me to eke out any more detail than my earlier shot. Color is likely even worse than the first try though all three channels used real data this time. Now that the supernova has faded the red color of hydrogen alpha is obvious. This may be hydrogen the star blew off before the explosion now being hit by the shockwave of the supernova. My severe underexposure makes it difficult to compare to the 2010 image.

Since a shock wave could still be exciting hydrogen ejected prior to the supernova, I revisited it again on January 8, 2013, nearly a year later. The hydrogen emission is still visible. Much like the shell from supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic cloud is still visible even today. I seem to have forgotten this one since the 2013 image. I need to revisit it.

I've included a full frame image from 2010 at 1" per pixel. As well as an annotated image from that date. I have then included a cropped image at 0.67" per pixel from 2010, 2012 and 2013 and a Hubble image with the location of the supernova circled. It was taken before it exploded. Since then Chandra agrees with my idea that this is a shell lit by a shockwave including lots of X-rays. SN 1987A didn't have the strong X-Ray emission, at least it couldn't penetrate the shell-like happened with 2010jl. You can read about it and the supernova itself at http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2012/sn2010/

I'll cover the very strange galaxy UGC 1589, the north end where the supernova blew is separately cataloged as UGC 1589A. UGC 5189 is a major train wreck of a galaxy in southwest Leo. Redshift puts it about 160 million light-years away. The upper part where SN 2010jl is located carries a separate designation of UGC 5189a. The UGC says of it: "Chaotic arc-shaped object, brightest in north-preceding part Probably chain of disrupted galaxies." The VV catalog confuses me with its description: "Very faint spiral(?) with a stellar nucleus and a bright extended arm to the northwest." OK, I agree the northwest part is by far brightest part. Is it calling the very blue star knot southeast of the "center" the stellar nucleus? A blue nucleus is extremely rare as they are normally made of old, red, population II stars. NED indicates the whole system might be classed as Im for an irregular of the Magellanic type. UGC 5189a as an Irregular system while the lower part is noted to be a Wolf Rayet galaxy, that is one in which Wolf Rayet stars dominate the spectrum. These are high mass stars near a violent death such as SN 2010jl experienced.

A slightly separated piece at the far southeast end carries a separate SDSS label and is listed as being a separate galaxy though it looks like it could be part of UGC 5189. To the southwest of UGC 5189 is a very distorted smudge of a blue galaxy also listed only the Sloan Survey. It has virtually the same redshift as UGC 5189 and its parts. Has it interacted with UGC 5189? I have no idea. NED has little on it but for the redshift. Well above UGC 5189 is a super faint smudge hiding behind a 17th magnitude star. It is AGC 198337. For such a faint smudge it is surprisingly the closest galaxy in the entire image at a redshift distance of only 82 million light-years. It has no classification at NED but it must be a very low surface brightness galaxy.

While all images were taken using 4 10 minute images for luminance and 2 for each color. The 2010 image had no usable blue so that has been reconstructed. The others were all hit by clouds so aren't at all comparable. But the supernova is likely rather comparable.

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

Related Designations for UGC05189

UGC05272

UGC 5272 is a rather small irregular galaxy of the Magellanic class. It is located about 36 million light-years distant. I measure its size at about 19,900 light-years if the redshift distance is correct. It has an apparent even smaller companion to its southwest, ASK 491420.0 which is only 3410 light-years in size assuming its redshift distance of 37 million light-years is correct.

I noticed a double galaxy with a long plume in the northeastern part of the image. It is a pair of interacting spiral galaxies. It is listed as 2MASX J09511248+3135377 at NED at a bit over 2 billion light-years. I measure its size including the long curving plume at 280,000 light-years. Ignoring the plume they are about 105,000 light-years across. The Sloan image can be seen here: http://skyservice.pha.jhu.edu/DR9/ImgCutout/getjpeg.aspx?ra=147.802156&dec=31.594127&scale=0.09903175&width=800&height=800&opt=&query=

One asteroid is in the image, a rather bright one in the lower right part of the image. See the annotated image for details.

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

Rick



http://www.mantrapskies.com/image-archive/OTHER/UGC05272/UGC05272L6X10RGB2X10.JPG
http://www.mantrapskies.com/image-archive/OTHER/UGC05272/UGC05272L6X10RGB2X10CROP125.JPG
http://www.mantrapskies.com/image-archive/OTHER/UGC05272/UGC05272L6X10RGB2X10ID.JPG

Related Designations for UGC05272

UGC05340

UGC 5340 is also known as DDO 68, VV542 and PGC 28714 as well as a lot of other designations. I'd call it the Seahorse Galaxy. It is a blue compact dwarf galaxy by some and Irregular Magellanic type dwarf by others. I can't fathom the compact classification. Also puzzling is the VV542 designation as that is a catalog of interacting galaxies but where's the one it is interacting with? If it was a compact dwarf something disrupted it into the spread out mess we see today. One note at NED asks: "Companion to Leo A?" That can be easily answered no as it is 10 times more distant than Leo A (aka Leo III). Also, I can easily resolve Leo III into hundreds of stars but can't see any in this galaxy. Leo III is some two degrees north of this galaxy as well. To me, this galaxy has a slight resemblance to a seahorse though the head is wrong. The annotated image shows only one galaxy in the field closer than 1 billion light-years and that one is barely under that limit. NGC 3068/Arp 174 is just out of the field to the east. I'd moved UGC 5340 west expecting to pick it up but somehow was 5 minutes off in my pointing. Fortunately, I had already taken Arp 174 years ago. It really is a pair of interacting galaxies.

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

Related Designations for UGC05340

UGC05497

UGC 5497 is a blue compact dwarf galaxy that is a member of the M81 galaxy group so very close to us. But being a dwarf very small. While it has been known for some time has made the UGC in 1973 it wasn't until 1999 that it was recognized as a nearby dwarf galaxy. You can read more about this discovery and see the HST image of it at: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1224a/ The HST image was taken using a red filter and an infrared filter so the color image is pseudo-color at best assigning blue to red and red to infrared. This makes it appear bluer than it really is since both green and blue stars are assigned the blue color in the HST image. Both redshift and a single tip of the red giant branch measurement give a distance of 12 million light-years. To take the TRGB red and IR images are needed so I suspect this measurement was made from the HST image and explains why it was made at those frequencies.

I've mentioned before how fuzzy the edge of a galaxy can be. This is easily seen in the HST image where nearly every star is resolved. The stars just thin out making it hard to determine which is the last one and which is just a field star in our galaxy. My measurement gives a size of a bit under 1 minute of arc but the HST image shows it out to at least 1.1 minute which is the value NED and other sources use though I see stars that likely belong to it even further out than that size would indicate. Using the 1.1 minute size and 12 million light-years for its distance its actual size would be 3,800 light-years with most of its stars confined to a smaller 2000 light year diameter area -- a dwarf indeed.

Since it wasn't much of a galaxy and is in a rather lonely part of Ursa Major I placed it low in the field to pick up a couple more distant galaxies to give something other than stars to look at in the image. They aren't much but this is a rather uninteresting part of the sky only 5 degrees south and a bit east of M81 itself. The field turned out to have 4 quasars and 9 quasar candidates. At 64° north, it's not surprising no asteroids are in the image though I did have to remove some orbiting space junk that tried to sneak into the frames.

The night I first tried to image this galaxy it clouded up. My cloud sensor was dying and told me the clouds were too thick but never shutting down. This caused the entire series to be retaken again with the result it was too cloudy. By this time I'd discovered the issue. It turned out the first night did have nasty clouds but they didn't hurt significantly the luminance and one red frame. The second night had good transparency but poorer seeing, especially when it came to the color frames. I ended up using the one red and all luminance frames that first night and everything from the second so my exposure times are not what I ordinarily would have used. Still, thanks to the lousy transparency it doesn't begin to go as deep as usual.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' R=3x10' GB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for UGC05497

UGC05600

UGC 5600 is a very strange, possibly polar ring galaxy in northern Draco about 130 million light-years distant. It is classed as S0? by NED and is surrounded by a faint ring. It also has a faint red linear feature going east and west through its inner region that doesn't reach the faint outer blue ring. I think this feature isn't real but an artifact of my limited resolution blending in foreground stars. There are two main papers on this one and they don't agree. One says "This galaxy shows optical emission in a large, diffuse face-on outer ring as well as in the inner, narrow, and apparently edge-on ring that is perpendicular to the position angle of the central object." That fits my description of the faint outer ring and the linear red feature. But a later paper says: "This system appears morphologically complex; it is interacting with a close companion (UGC 5609) of similar size that lies only 1 arcmin (~14 kpc) away. Two other companions of similar redshift are also nearby. Because of the interaction, it does not have a typical polar-ring morphology. A thin extension, perhaps an edge-on inner ring, appears in the north-south direction, while an outer ring, with the same orientation but rounder (maybe less inclined with respect to the sky) surrounds the galaxy." This says the two features are both oriented north-south. I see no such edge-on inner ring". Nor do I see it in the SLOAN image. But then I don't see the east-west feature either! I'm confused.

While both papers refer to UGC 5909 the later paper says there are two other nearby galaxies with the same redshift as the UGC pair. The second says there are none at NED which agrees with my check of NED. So what are these two? One may be the galaxy to the northeast which is VII Zw 323. A note for it says: "Probably associated with two blue post-eruptive spirals..." then names the two UGC galaxies using a different catalog designation. But I'm lost as to a 4th. There's only one other galaxy with redshift data at NED and that is CGCG 350-047 but it is 380 million light-years distant, three times further away. Look for it in the lower right corner by a fairly bright orange star.

Oddly I find little on UGC 5609. It is a ring galaxy with the core pushed to one side of the ring. This is almost always, maybe always, caused by a dead-on collision of a spiral with a dense small galaxy. The effect is to push the spiral's core to the side of a ring this creates. But the only mention of this I find is one that just says this galaxy has an eccentric nucleus and nothing further. So where is the galaxy that caused this mayhem? It seems nowhere to be found unless somehow UGC 5600 did the deed. That might be the case. A third paper says that UGC 5600 is forming a ring due to current accretion from a companion. Adding that such galaxies are characterized by peculiar velocity fields. It goes on to say: "The rotation curve along the major axis of the galaxy is very peculiar, with counter-rotation in the central (|r| < 5") part. Rotation of the suspected ring is more regular: to a first approximation, the observed radial velocities follow a straight line ({sigma} = 17.6 km/s)." Note it makes no mention of this being a polar ring nor of the second ring the other papers mention. Now my head really hurts.

The papers can be found at:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1994AJ....107...99R
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1997MNRAS.284..773G
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/bib_query?1994A%26A...291...57R
I've listed these in the order mentioned above.

With not much else on all the galaxies in the field, I didn't make an annotated image. While the DR9 SLOAN release does cover this field it is yet to be picked up by NED. Edit: It has since been picked up by NED along with other catalogs. It may now be worth annotating if I had the time, which I don't.

Seeing was very poor for this image so it is rather soft. Yet another of many that would benefit from a retake it likely won't get.

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

Related Designations for UGC05600

UGC05676

UGC 5676/PGC 30871 is a very strange galaxy in Ursa Major just off the southwest corner of the bowl of the Big Dipper asterism. NED gives it the classification of SBdm:. I see a slight hint of a spiral structure but can't begin to classify it. But then most Magellanic spirals like the Magellanic Clouds are too distorted for my brain to see the spiral structure. Its blue color indicates it has had strong star formation in the recent past but not quite enough to rank it in the starburst class. Redshift puts it about 73 million light-years from us so it is rather nearby compared to most galaxies I image. But it is quite small in angular size. It appears to be no more than 30,000 light years across including the edges of the plumes it seems to have. That would make it about the same size as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

It may be related to Arp 233 I posted back on January 16, 2011. In that post, I mentioned that this galaxy may be the cause of Arp 233's starburst activity. I found one paper indicating this possibility. If I put UGC 5676 in the upper right corner I could just fit Arp 233 in the lower left corner but since the corners of my frames have a bit lower resolution than the rest of the frame due to severe vignetting reducing the signal there and some curvature of the field I decided against it. Nor did I frame Arp 233 so I could mosaic the two frames. Redshift puts Arp 233 at 71 million light-years, almost the same as UGC 5676. It, however, is a very compact galaxy of high density. Using a distance of 71 million light-years the separation of these two is less than 800,000 light-years. They could have easily been close enough to interact less than a billion years ago. The denser Arp 233 could easily create the mess that is now UGC 5676 and they could have triggered star formation in each other that we see still going on today. Then it's also possible they never did interact and they are both the way they are from other causes. I thought UGC 5676 sufficiently strange to make my Arp-like listing.

Again, weather nailed me. Being faint and not certain if it had far-flung plumes I took 9 luminance frames and 5 for each color but had to throw out 4 luminance and two of each color due to bad seeing, clouds and an ice fisherman with a multi-million candlepower light that swamped the scope when he decided to use it to study what the heck that strange building on the hill was. That happens several times each winter. Happens with boaters in summer as well. Each seems to try and have a more powerful light than the other guy. Why there's this competition beyond reason I can't fathom.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=5x10' RGB=3x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for UGC05676

UGC05829

Arachnid Alert

UGC 5829, often called The Spider Galaxy, is an irregular galaxy in Leo Minor about 42 million light-years away. Though the one and only Tully-Fisher measurement put it much closer at 26 million light-years. While NED lists a bright spot in the galaxy as a part of the galaxy it lists another as a separate galaxy. I rather doubt this but I suppose it is possible so have noted it in the annotated image. NED classes it as Im, that is an irregular galaxy of the Magellanic type like our Magellanic Clouds. Still, two older notes at NED refer to it as a "Large, disrupted spiral." and "May be low-density spiral like NGC 4236." I took NGC 4236 in 2008 and have attached it for comparison. I really don't see the similarity. If it is a disrupted spiral could the object NED shows as a separate galaxy, SDSS J104245.20+342738.4, be the cause? Seems a stretch as it is more likely a star cloud in the galaxy and if separate apparently has too little mass to disrupt anything as big as this galaxy. Still, I've pointed it out just in case.

To the northwest of UGC 5829 is a huge split arm spiral galaxy Arp didn't include in his split arm classification. It is KUG 1039+347A/PGC 031873. Redshift puts it 790 million light-years away. I measure it at 44.3" of arc across. That comes to 170,000 light-years for its diameter. Must be a spectacular sight for those with a much closer view.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RB=4x10'x3 G=3x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for UGC05829

UGC05904

UGC 05904 is a pair of likely interacting galaxies in Ursa Major about 300 million light-years distant. The southern member, UGC 5904a, an Sb galaxy with a narrow line active galaxy nucleus is also known as 2MFGC 08412 so makes the less demanding 2 micron flat galaxy catalog but isn't flat enough for the FGC itself. It's companion, UGC 05904b is listed as an elliptical galaxy. It seems to have a well-defined core with a rather blue disk and apparent dust lanes that seem to define a vague spiral pattern. While it's redshift would seem to put it more distant than UGC 05904a by some 3 million light-years this is likely just due to their relative velocities rather than being a real distance difference. Which galaxy is in front? If it is the edge on spiral it could be the dust lanes in the elliptical are due to the dust lane in the spiral seen against the more distant elliptical. Still, it looks to me that the elliptical is in front. Spectral data should answer this question but I found none in the literature. The disk of the spiral is warped with the northwest end bending up and the southeast end warped down. Though much of this downward warp is due to a plume-like blob of stars with the actual disk extending pretty much on plane beyond it. But even that does warp down some. The northwest end can be seen beyond the elliptical and appears rather like a blob rather than a well-defined end of the edge on disk you'd expect to see.

Besides the normal objects in my annotated image, this one has one listed as a candidate for a broad lined AGN and an entry from the SHOC catalog which lists galaxies from the Sloan survey with HII emission and an abundance of Oxygen. The letters stand for Sloan HII galaxies with Oxygen Abundances Catalog. Now that's a mouthful. The galaxy is a blue compact galaxy as well. There are two other NLAGN galaxies in the image beside UGC 05904a. Besides the 3 distant quasars and one quasar candidate (UvES) in the image, there were even more just outside my field of view. No asteroids, however. Declination is too high for most known asteroids.

Again seeing and transparency was well below normal. This robbed me of a couple magnitudes. The one galaxy cluster would normally have stood out quite well in normal conditions, rather than being a barely resolved blob you see here.

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

Related Designations for UGC05904

UGC05936

UGC 5936 is a ring galaxy about 340 million light-years distant in northeastern Leo Minor just a half degree from much closer Arp 206. I see the upper corner of this image overlaps my poorly processed 2008 image of Arp 206. I'm fascinated by galaxies like this one in which there's no arm structure, just a faint featureless star disk, between the reddish core and bluish ring. There seems to be a hint of structure to the ring but seeing was too poor this night to know if that is real or not. Right beside it is a small spherical galaxy. Did it have anything to do with creating the ring? I wish I knew. I didn't find it in either Simbad nor NED. SDSS does list it under photometric sources so do know about it, just not as a galaxy as its boundaries for UGC 5936 include the possible companion. I've not had time to investigate further or check the many catalogs in VizieR, not in NED or Simbad themselves.

It's always nice when I can get two off the to-do list with one image. To the lower left is the very flat and slightly warped FGC 1139. It has no sign of a central bulge being just a thin disk. It is listed as being an Sd galaxy. Its redshift is similar to UGC 5936 so is likely part of its local group. Other likely members are PGC 32441 and ASK 525319.0.

Many of the other galaxies in the image are quite distant ranging from 2 to 4.73 billion light-years. Many are the Bright Cluster Galaxy anchoring galaxy groups. Most of these distances are photographically determined (p) rather than spectroscopically determined and thus a bit suspect. Though those with both measurements do have spectroscopic redshifts that closely agree to the photographic redshift giving me some confidence in these distance estimates.

There are several quasars out past 10 billion light-years all with spectroscopic redshifts. So even with the poor seeing transparency was sufficient to reach down past 22nd magnitude and pick up these distant objects.

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

Related Designations for UGC05936