NGC1169

I spotted NGC 1169 on many web photos taken with wide angle lenses of Comet Holmes. It showed as a faint yellowish blob on these photos. I decided to see what it looked like. This is taken through the Milky Way's dust lane that blocks light from most distant galaxies. It is rather surprising to find any in this part of the sky. In fact, it is often called the "Zone of Avoidance". Galaxies don't avoid this area, they just can't be seen through it. Apparently, there's a hole in the dust in this zone that allows this guy and many more distant ones through. The clue there's still a lot of dust is the yellow color. Spiral galaxies normally have very blue arms caused by the newly formed hot blue stars that make up the arms. But Milky way dust scatters most of the blue light preventing it from reaching us and turning the galaxies toward the red end of the spectrum. Note this has nothing to do with "Red Shift". This is the same scattering of blue light that causes our sun to appear orange or red at sunset. Seen through a lot more atmosphere the blue light is scattered away turning it red. All the galaxies in this photo have nearly the same yellow-orange color indicating the dust is pretty much the same density and of the same particle size all across the image. NGC 1169 was discovered by William Herschel on December 11, 1786. It is in the second H400 observing program.

All galaxies in this image are distant. Closest, of course, is NGC 1169 at 100 million light years. I like the 4 to the upper right. 3 are nice thin spirals and 1 a face on spiral. The three thin guys from bottom to top are UGC 02496 at 300 million light years, LEDA 213150 at 528 million light years and LEDA 213153 at an unknown distance. I found no info on the distance to any of the others. The face on in this group of apparently unrelated galaxies is LEDA 213151

The barred spiral just above and left of 1169 is AGC 130456. Above it near the top is AGC 130457

The only other one I bothered to look up is the one at the far right below center It has a mouthful of a name HFLLBZOA K547
HFLLBZOA stands for Hav, Ferguson, Lahav, Lynden, Bell Zone of Avoidance Galaxies.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x5' RGB=3x5', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC1169

NGC1174

NGC 1174/1186 made my to-do list for being a good example of the newly discovered class of galaxies called Red Spiral Galaxies. Also it has some very interesting structure. Located in western Perseus about 4.25 degrees east of M34. It is thought to be about 120 million light-years away. NED classes it as SB(r)bc: while the NGC Project closely agrees saying SBb-c. The only other galaxy in the image with redshift data is NPM1G +42.0108 at twice the distance, 245 million light-years. It is the elliptical like galaxy due east (left) of NGC 1174 not far from the left edge of the image. Only a very few other galaxies are even listed in NED, none with classification, distance or magnitude. All are from the 2MASS survey. Therefore I didn't bother to make an annotated image.

The galaxy was first seen by William Herschel on October 27, 1786. Dreyer recorded that sighting as NGC 1186. Lewis Swift saw it on August, 31, 1883. That entry was recorded by Dreyer as NGC 1174. Apparently neither got the position quite right. Several (William Parsons, Heinrich d'Arrest and maybe Guillaume Bigourdan) looked for it but could not find it. Bigourdan may or may not have found it. Rudolf Spitaler was the first to realize they were the same object. It isn't in either H400 observing program.

Red spirals are somewhat of a puzzle in that they shouldn't exist by some theories of spiral galaxy formation. The arms are thought to be created by density waves powered by the light pressure of massive stars and the shockwave from the super novas they create when they die. Thus they are a self perpetuating feature. But they need a supply of new stars to keep them going. New star formation creates a lot of super hot blue stars needed to power the density waves. Thus spiral arms are blue with their light dominated by these super stars. If star formation ceases super hot stars die and with it, the theory goes, so does the spiral structure. Yet these red spirals too weak in such stars to have the spiral structure seen. Something else is going on or these stars are not seen.

Most red spirals are seen in galaxy clusters and there is a theory for them saying that as they get drawn in to the center region of the cluster from the outskirts where most blue spirals live that this somehow slowly strangles star formation but does so gently enough the spiral structure remains for at least a short period. You can read more about that at: http://www.universetoday.com/21457/unusual-red-spiral-galaxies-strangled/ or you can read the gory details (hip waders may be useful) at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.4113 .

The theory says this happens mostly to larger spiral galaxies. Well NGC 1174 is a large galaxy. I get a size of just about 100,000 light-years and as spirals go that is big. But it isn't in a galaxy cluster. It is considered part of a very sparse and widely separated group known as the NGC 1186 group. It is so spread out no other member is in my image. Certainly not anything like what the theory of strangled spirals requires. Nor is this a case of the galaxy being reddened by dust in our galaxy as even more distant galaxies right near it are quite blue. Unless the dust is only directly in line with NGC 1174 and is a small cloud would that happen. Spectroscopic data would prove the issue one way or the other but that's not available. I'll just say I can't buy all the coincidences needed for this to be dust reddening either in our galaxy or because NGC 1174 is in a dusty cocoon.

One answer may be that these galaxies do have current star formation going on but had so much formation in the past that the red stars from that era are still around in vast numbers thus skewing the color to red even though there are a normal number of stars being formed in a spiral galaxy. Studies of some of these with IR and UV light seems to support this. For this you need a galaxy with 10 billion times the mass of the sun. Is NGC 1174 that big? I don't know. It certainly appears to have the dust and gas needed for sustained star formation. In any case again this study was done using cluster galaxies from the same Galaxy Zoo articles referred to in the above links. You can read about this idea at:
http://astrobites.org/2012/06/06/red-spirals-are-not-dead/ The URL pretty much tells the story.

The field contains weak IFN which is strongest to the lower left. I see hints of it in the POSS plates so am quite confident it is real. This might be a good field for those that spend many hours on a target would find interestingly dusty. I don't begin to have the needed time into my image to bring it out.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount MENGC 1174 made my to-do list for being a good example of the newly discovered class of galaxies called Red Spiral Galaxies. Also, it has some very interesting structure. Located in western Perseus about 4.25 degrees east of M34. It is thought to be about 120 million light-years away. NED classes it as SB(r)bc: while the NGC Project closely agrees saying SBb-c. The only other galaxy in the image with redshift data is NPM1G +42.0108 at twice the distance, 245 million light-years. It is the elliptical like galaxy due east (left) of NGC 1174 not far from the left edge of the image. Only a very few other galaxies are even listed in NED, none with classification, distance or magnitude. All are from the 2MASS survey. Therefore I didn't bother to make an annotated image.

The galaxy was first seen by William Herschel on October 27, 1786. Dreyer recorded that sighting as NGC 1186. Lewis Swift saw it on August 31, 1883. That entry was recorded by Dreyer as NGC 1174. Apparently, neither got the position quite right. Several (William Parsons, Heinrich d'Arrest and maybe Guillaume Bigourdan) looked for it but could not find it. Bigourdan may or may not have found it. Rudolf Spitaler was the first to realize they were the same object. It isn't in either H400 observing program.

Red spirals are somewhat of a puzzle in that they shouldn't exist by some theories of spiral galaxy formation. The arms are thought to be created by density waves powered by the light pressure of massive stars and the shockwave from the supernovas they create when they die. Thus they are a self-perpetuating feature. But they need a supply of new stars to keep them going. New star formation creates a lot of super hot blue stars needed to power the density waves. Thus spiral arms are blue with their light dominated by these superstars. If star formation ceases super hot stars die and with it, the theory goes, so does the spiral structure. Yet these red spirals too weak in such stars to have the spiral structure seen. Something else is going on or these stars are not seen.

Most red spirals are seen in galaxy clusters and there is a theory for them saying that as they get drawn into the center region of the cluster from the outskirts where most blue spirals live that this somehow slowly strangles star formation but does so gently enough the spiral structure remains for at least a short period. You can read more about that at: http://www.universetoday.com/21457/unusual-red-spiral-galaxies-strangled/ or you can read the gory details (hip waders may be useful) at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.4113 .

The theory says this happens mostly to larger spiral galaxies. Well NGC 1174 is a large galaxy. I get a size of just about 100,000 light-years and as spirals go that is big. But it isn't in a galaxy cluster. It is considered part of a very sparse and widely separated group known as the NGC 1186 group. It is so spread out no other member is in my image. Certainly not anything like what the theory of strangled spirals requires. Nor is this a case of the galaxy being reddened by dust in our galaxy as even more distant galaxies right near it are quite blue. Unless the dust is only directly in line with NGC 1174 and is a small cloud would that happen. Spectroscopic data would prove the issue one way or the other but that's not available. I'll just say I can't buy all the coincidences needed for this to be dust reddening either in our galaxy or because NGC 1174 is in a dusty cocoon.

One answer may be that these galaxies do have current star formation going on but had so much formation in the past that the red stars from that era are still around in vast numbers thus skewing the color to red even though there are a normal number of stars being formed in a spiral galaxy. Studies of some of these with IR and UV light seems to support this. For this, you need a galaxy with 10 billion times the mass of the sun. Is NGC 1174 that big? I don't know. It certainly appears to have the dust and gas needed for sustained star formation. In any case, again this study was done using cluster galaxies from the same Galaxy Zoo articles referred to in the above links. You can read about this idea at:
http://astrobites.org/2012/06/06/red-spirals-are-not-dead/ The URL pretty much tells the story.

The field contains weak IFN which is strongest to the lower left. I see hints of it in the POSS plates so am quite confident it is real. This might be a good field for those that spend many hours on a target would find interestingly dusty. I don't begin to have the needed time into my image to bring it out.

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

Related Designations for NGC1174

NGC1193

NGC 1193 is an open cluster not far (as seen in the sky, that is) from NGC 1245. Like 1245 it is in the winter Milky Way in Perseus. The Milky Way is our galaxy seen edge-on from inside the disk of the galaxy about 25,000 light years from the center (about halfway out to the edge). In the summer we are looking toward the center of the galaxy. Stars are packed more and more densely as you approach the core of our galaxy. Thus the summer Milky Way is bright as there are lots of stars to look through. So many we can't even see to the core of our galaxy in visible light. Dust in the galaxy blocks the view. We have to use infrared light to see to our galaxy's core. But in winter we are looking the opposite way, to the outside of our galaxy. Here stars get less and less densely packed so far fewer stars make up the winter Milky Way. It is faint and often overlooked as it is so faint. Still, this is where you find open clusters like NGC 1193. Because the stars and dust are so thin looking out of the galaxy we can see farther and thus see more distant clusters. As clusters get more distant they appear smaller to us. NGC 1193 is a good example. Though I couldn't find any reliable distance estimate to this cluster most sources list it as one of the older open clusters in our galaxy with an age about the same or a little older than our sun which is 4.6 billion years old. Most open clusters are torn apart by tidal forces in our galaxy and never get very old. In fact, most, if not all, the stars in this image were formed in clusters of this type that were then torn apart and distributed through our galaxy. Our sun likely did the same. Visually this cluster is very faint and needs at least an 8" telescope to start to see the individual stars.

The above was written back in 2008. WEBDA didn't exist then. It now says the cluster is almost 8 billion years old and 14,000 light-years distant. It is barely reddened by only 0.12 magnitudes showing how little dust there is in this part of the winter Milky Way. For a cluster 8 billion years old I'm surprised how blue most of its stars are. I'd expect there to be only a few of that color left as only very late F class stars or cooler would still be on the main sequence at that age. The cluster was discovered by William Herschel on October 24, 1786. It is in the second H400 observing program.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x5' RGB=2x5', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC1193

NGC1207

NGC 1207 is a nice face on spiral in Perseus. It made my list for two reasons. First of all, it is a bit odd in shape with two odd arms that, at first glance, come from two cores. The two cores is an illusion as one is just a field star. The other reason for making my list is it is one of the second Herschel 400 objects. While I'm far from done with the first list I am also picking up an occasional object from the second list when it is otherwise interesting as in this case. William Herschel discovered it in 1786. The galaxy is about 210 million light-years distant. NED classifies it as SA(rs)b while the NGC project says simply Sb. I see a faint orange bar going nearly north-south from the core to the ring. Apparently, it doesn't meet the requirements of a true bar. Edit: I see Seligman classifies it as SAB(rs)bc? so he sees a bar. William Herschel discovered it on October 18, 1786.

It has a companion, also about 210 million light-years away to the west, CGCG 524-054. While it appears to be a spiral it isn't classified at NED. Also, it has a strange dark lane cutting across the southwest part of the disk. Is it really part of the galaxy or a small dark cloud between us, possibly in our galaxy that creates this odd feature. The elongation of the core is another illusion. The eastern side is actually a star. My stretch has blended the core and the star into one feature. Where's good seeing gone to?

Like other galaxies I've processed of late, this one is in an area little studied for its galaxies. While NED lists about 18 galaxies in my field from the 2MASS survey, not one has distance nor even magnitude data so, again, no annotated image.

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

Related Designations for NGC1207

NGC1245

NGC 1245 is a Trumpler class III1r open cluster in Perseus. This cluster is a lot farther away than M34 in the last update. WEBDA puts it at 9,400 light-years distant. Other sources say it is about 8000 light years distant. At this distance, only the massive stars are easily seen. Since massive stars burn blue hot we see lots of them in this cluster. So what about the orange stars? Those are even bigger stars that have already used up their hydrogen and are now burning helium. This turns them into red supergiant stars. Oddly "red" stars are really an orange color in most cases. Orange stars tend to look yellow and yellow stars like the sun look white. Confusing isn't it. Problem is our eyes. They've evolved to see the sun's somewhat yellow light as white. Everything else shifts because of this. This is one reason astronomers use instruments rather than their eyes to "see" what is really going on. I found a rather wide range of ages for this cluster. WEBDA says it is half a billion years old. They say it is reddened by 0.3 magnitudes indicating rather less dust than normal between us.

The cluster was first seen by William Herschel on December 11, 1786. It is in the original H400 observing program. I logged it with my 10" f/5 at 80x on the fair night of September 10, 1985. My entry reads; "Large, even, somewhat rich, open cluster. Stars seem randomly scattered with no condensation. Doubt if the stated 40 stars will be seen my most with a 6" scope as claimed. I barely saw that many with my 10."

I had to put this one together from a rather odd group of images due to trying several times and getting clouded out. The color data is rather unbalanced with 2 red, 3 green and 5 blue frames used. Still, I think I have the colors about right. Reproduced at 1.5" of arc per pixel.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=12x5' R=2x5' G=3x5' B=5x5', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC1245

NGC1275

The Perseus Galaxy Cluster is one of the richest nearby galaxy clusters known. It is about 240 million light-years distant and is the Abell 426 Galaxy Cluster. It consists of over 1000 galaxies. It is anchored by NGC 1275 a huge Narrow Line Radio Galaxy classified as a Peculiar cD/S0? galaxy due to all the emission line features it contains. This is because it really is two superimposed galaxies, one a dusty spiral seen against the massive elliptical galaxy. Since the elliptical is brighter than the spiral's arms they are seen as dark features against the spiral. Well, they are in better images than mine. Unfortunately, this is a very early image of mine when I was doing everything wrong in my beginner's ignorance. I really need to retake this one, something I keep saying but never seems to happen.

The annotated image only annotates NGC and a selected PGC galaxies out of 124 in the image with redshift data. I limited the annotation because finding places to put the annotation was difficult enough with the few I did include. Doesn't help that my ignorance results in the galaxy cores appearing saturated making seeing the labels impossible when they overwrite a galaxy or star. This was due to processing ignorance. I didn't reprocess it as the data is poor, to begin with. I suggest that you look elsewhere for images of this one. Below is a listing of the annotated galaxies from west to east (right to left) along with discovery data and an occasional comment.

NGC 1260 S0/a: discovered by Guillaume Bigourdan on October 19, 1884.
NGC 1264 SBa-b Discovered by Guillaume Bigourdan on October 19, 1884.
NGC 1267 E+ Discovered by Heinrich d'Arrest on February 14, 1864 A star in our galaxy makes the core appear much brighter than it really is.
NGC 1268 SAB(rs)b: Discovered by Heinrich d'Arrest on February 14, 1864.
NGC 1270 E Discovered by Heinrich d'Arrest on February 14, 1864.
NGC 1271 SB0? Discovered by Guillaume Bigourdan on November 14, 1884.
NGC 1272 E+ Discovered by Heinrich d'Arrest on February 14, 1884.
NGC 1273 SA(r)0^0^ Discovered by Heinrich d'Arrest on February 14, 1884.
NGC 1274 E3 Discovered by Lawrence Parsons on December 4, 1875.
NGC 1275 Also known as Perseus A due to its strong radio emission cD/S0? Discovered by William Herschel on October 17, 1786 It isn't in either H400 observing program which surprised me.
NGC 1276 Is not in the annotated image as it is a pair of stars west and a bit north of NGC 1281 near the top of my frame. John Dreyer himself is responsible for this mistake on December 12, 1876.
NGC 1277 S0+ pec was discovered by Lawrence Parsons on December 4, 1875.
NGC 1278 E pec Heinrich d'Arrest on February 14, 1884.
NGC 1279 S/S0? was discovered by John Dreyer on December 12, 1876. He got this one right.
NGC 1281 E5 Discovered by John Dreyer on December 12, 1876.
NGC 1282 E: Discovered by Guillaume Bigourdan on October 23, 1884
NGC 1283 E1 Discovered by Guillaume Bigourdan on October 23, 1884.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x5' R=2x5' G=3x5'x3 B=2x7', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC1275

NGC1334

NGC 1334 is an odd galaxy in Perseus about 180 to 190 million light-years from us. That would make it about 80 thousand light-years in diameter. A rather substantial sized spiral galaxy. NED says it is S? pec: while the NGC Project is more sure saying S pec. What type of spiral neither is willing to say. One paper says it is a "spiral with a bar." In any case, it was odd enough looking to make my list of peculiar galaxies Arp didn't include in his atlas. I find some indication it may be a starburst galaxy and it made several radio galaxy catalogs. Besides the obvious very non-symmetrical arm structure there appears to be a somewhat disconnected faint blob to the west (right) of the galaxy that lies between two stars, nearer the eastern one. This isn't listed in NED as a separate object nor does the size for NGC 1334 NED lists encompass it. I have no idea what it is. I see it in the SDSS image as well so it is real. I suppose it could be a tidal plume of some sort or it may be unrelated. There's no sign of any galaxy that has perturbed it but it could have devoured a small galaxy causing its disturbed appearance. I found nothing in the literature on this, however.

Only two other galaxies in the image have any redshift data at NED. CGCG 541-012 is the rather featureless disk galaxy to the northwest (upper right) which is simply listed as a spiral galaxy in NED is at about the same redshift as NGC 1334 and thus a likely member of the same local group. The only other galaxy with a redshift is the smaller appearing red disk galaxy to the southeast (lower left) of NGC 1334. It is NPM1G +41.0122 at about 250 million light-years. NED leaves its classification blank. While a few other galaxies are listed in NED there's not much on any of them, not even a magnitude estimate. This field is in the SDSS DB9 data release but that hasn't yet been published at NED. I imagine it will add a lot more information to this field when that happens. As I haven't found a way to overlay that data onto my image as I can the SDSS data in NED, I've not tried slogging through it. I'll wait for NED to do the work for me.

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

Related Designations for NGC1334

NGC1342

NGC 1342 is an open cluster in southern Perseus about 6 and a third degrees west of the far more famous California nebula. Like much of Perseus it is embedded in some dust. The night I took this data the sky was full of floating ice crystals with the temperature near -30C. These act like a thin fog brightening the image considerably while adding a haze around the brighter stars. I was surprised any of the dust survived this treatment. I'd hoped for more data to pull in the dust but the sky quickly went bad and I never got back to it again. This will have to do.

WEBDA puts the cluster at about 2170 light-years and gives an age of 450 million years. Its old enough that some of the more massive blue stars have died and turned to white dwarfs while others, a bit smaller are now red giants seen in the cluster along with the still "youthful" massive blue stars that so dominate the cluster. It was discovered on December 28, 1799 by William Herschel. It made the original Herschel 400 observing program. My visual notes from September 10, 1985 under poor transparency due to heavy humidity along the lakeshore where the scope was set up reads: "Large bright (easy in a dew covered 8x50 finder) star cluster. Very irregularly shaped. Consists of strings of bright stars arranged in helter-skelter fashion. A very different appearing cluster!" I sorta see this in my image. Though none of the dust was mentioned so likely not seen.

There's one asteroid in the image, (778) Theobalda at an estimated magnitude of 13.7. it is a short, nearly vertical multicolored streak in the lower right part of the image. I have no idea why the green filter is so bright compared to the red and blue unless the asteroid was so bright in the luminance it bled into the green. I originally thought a star might be there but none is seen in any survey image I looked at. It's steep downward and a bit east motion indicates it had just recently changed from retrograde motion to its normal eastward motion. It was discovered January 25, 1914 by Franz Kaiser and named for Theobald Kaiser, his father. He did his Ph.D. At Heidelberg-Königstuhl Observatory which was a center for asteroid discovery. He discovered several while working on his degree but I can't find how many. Asteroid 3183, found by Karl Wilhelm Reinmuth (he was a grad student when Franz was but stayed on after getting his degree) on August 2, 1949, is now named for him as (3183) Franzkaiser. Earlier Reinmuth found many other asteroids, one of which he named (1111) Reinmuthia for himself, a practice not allowed today. He does, however, deserve this as he found nearly 400 asteroids between 1914 and 1957. He died in 1979. OK a bit of overkill on the asteroid but there's nothing else in the image I found worth mentioning.

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

Related Designations for NGC1342

NGC1343

NGC 1343 is a barred spiral in far eastern Cassiopeia. So far east the very eastern end of it is in Camelopardalis. Non-redshift measurements place it about 30 million light-years distant while redshift, often unreliable close in says only 10 which I think highly inaccurate. NED and most others classify it as SAB(s)b: pec. I'd expect a notation of its inner ring about the core but that's not included in any classification even though it is a major feature of this galaxy. Many barred spirals have a fine, usually very hard to detect ring like this formed from gas flowing into the core fed by the bar structure. In this case, the bar structure is faint and the ring extremely blue and obvious. Though many images I found of it overstretch the core to the point that the ring is lost. There is a galaxy on its northeastern edge, HFLLZOA I126 (Hau+Ferguson+Lahav+Lynden-Bell Zone of Avoidance Galaxies catalog). NED has no redshift or other distance data on it so I can't say if it is a true companion or not but there does appear to be a bridge of stars connecting the two. The CGPG mentions this saying: "Bright neutral ring-shaped core. Large elliptical halo with plume [north-east]." Notice no mention of the second galaxy. Or is this second galaxy just naturally elongated giving the impression of a bridge that isn't there? Either seems possible to my eye.

The galaxy was discovered on October 11, 1787 by William Herschel but isn't in either Herschel 400 observing program. Apparently, it is too faint. Using the 30 million light-year distance it is 20,000 light-years across its long axis. The ring is less than 6,000 light-years across.

There's an interesting PDF file on one idea of how ring structures form in barred galaxies that uses this galaxy in the presentation. Since it appears to be a file used for graphics for the full presentation so a lot is missing but those into theoretical considerations of galaxy structures might find it interesting. How a possible companion galaxy with tidal plume would alter a ring isn't mentioned. https://science.nrao.edu/science/meetings/IAU303-GC2013/talks/IAU303-Kim_W.pdf

I find it interesting the ring is nearly perfectly round and thus seen face on while the rest of the galaxy is highly oval. The bar appears to extend faintly to widest parts of this low surface brightness oval. Is this disk tilted with the inner ring face on? While oval this outer disk gives me the impression of being seen face on. How the outer part becomes oval and the inter circular pr the disk tilted with the ring face on I don't know. Nothing I found covered this oddity.

Without any useful information on any of the other galaxies in the image, I didn't prepare an annotated image.

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

Related Designations for NGC1343

NGC1346

NGC 1346 is an interesting Lower-Luminosity InfraRed Galaxy (LLIRG) in Eridanus about 180 million light-years away. Some sources say it is a Seyfert 1 galaxy. NED classifies it as Sb Pec? while the NGC Project says only that it is a spiral. A spiral with interesting plumes. It has a companion with a very similar redshift, MCG -01-09-041. It is classified as Sa pec with spectral lines. It too seems highly distorted. It appears these two are an interacting pair. Transparency and seeing were poor when I took this in November 2012. Thus the plumes around NGC 1346 didn't show like I would have preferred them to.

The annotated image shows data only for the lower half of the image. NED's Sloan data stops just north of NGC 1346 and that's where most of the redshift data I use comes from. Sloan's DR9 does cover the full frame but that data isn't in NED as yet. Using Sloan's database isn't nearly as convenient so I only annotated the portion NED covers. It has a lot of UvES (ultraviolet excess sources) that are quasar candidates. All their redshifts are by photographic methods which aren't as reliable as full spectroscopic data used for many of the galaxies and all proven quasars in the image.

Due to very poor conditions, the galaxies in the galaxy clusters just didn't come through like I'd have expected. Bad conditions is a broken record for much of 2012 and all of 2013 so far. While I used 5 luminance subs they are through very bright skies of low transparency costing me at least two magnitudes and adding noise. Airglow was severe as well as there was a low-level aurora adding to the problems.

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

Related Designations for NGC1346