NGC3162

NGC 3162 is a distorted near face on spiral galaxy in the neck of Leo the Lion about 72 to 74 million light-years distant by redshift and non-redshift measurements. One paper describes it "NGC 3162 is an Sbc spiral of low inclination. One arm is prominent, the other one much weaker. This could be a consequence of an interaction." I find no nearby galaxy it might have interacted with. Only PGC 029756 is in the image at the right distance. It is rather small and undistorted making it an unlikely candidate.

It could be due to something it ate long ago I suppose. The annotated image points to a small round object with a redshift the same as the galaxy. NED refers to it a being part of the galaxy, that is, a star cloud in it, though it is unusually round for one also very blue as these clouds often are. But instead, could it be the core of whatever this guy ate causing its odd shape? I found no papers discussing this so it is pure unsupported conjecture on my part.

Anyway, it has a nice arm with a long spur coming from it but the other side of the galaxy only has a short tightly wrapped arm. The spur seems to then cause a huge very blue low surface brightness arm that nearly doubles the size of the galaxy. Even with this arm, I measure its size as a bit less than 65 million light-years.

The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on March 12, 1784. It is in the second Herschel 400 program. It is listed twice in the NGC. It was discovered by Heinrich d'Arrest nearly 80 years later on February 21, 1863. But he got the position wrong causing it to get its own entry in the NGC when Dreyer apparently didn't catch the error.

The rest of the field is rather unremarkable with the usual background of distant galaxies and quasars. Most are listed at NED as quasar candidates but I suspect they are likely quasars due to their brightness and distance. Little else could be that bright and distant. Also, 3 asteroids barely show in the raw FITS data but loses due to the JPG process made them so faint I didn't bother to point them out. They were about 21st magnitude and moving rapidly making them hard to pick up.

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

Related Designations for NGC3162

NGC3166

NGC 3166 and 3169 are a pair of interacting galaxies Arp somehow missed. Third NGC galaxy is NGC 3165. All three are at the same redshift distance with any differences being within measurement error and relative velocity as they encounter each other. All three appear distorted with NGC 2169 on the east side being really tore up with tidal clouds and plumes everywhere. Some images indicate a curving plume from 3166 going southeast then back northeast to 3169. It is broken, not continuous in my image. Likely due to my very short exposure time. A much broader connection seems to go directly east/west between the two so it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. With all the debris from their interaction, I don't understand way Arp didn't include this one in his atlas of peculiar galaxies. They are located in Sextans about 73 to 78 million light-years away. If this is correct these are two very large galaxies. NGC 3166 would be about 120 thousand light-years across. NGC 3169 would be 145 thousand light-years across. "Little" NGC 3165 would be 33 thousand light-years in diameter.

While NGC 3165 shows no plumes it has a very odd structure.
NED classes it as SA(s)dm indicating it is a Magellanic type galaxy. The NGC Project just classes it as an irregular galaxy. Is it naturally this way or is this due to interaction with the other two, far larger galaxies? NGC 3166 is classed by NED as SAB(rs)0/a;HII LINER. NGC Project says simply S0 or Sa. Odd as it appears to me to have a very strong, short bar. NGC 3169 is classed by NED as SA(s)a pec;HII LINER while the NGC project just says Sa.

A very low surface brightness galaxy SDSS J101329.62+032655.1 lies above NGC 3165 and a bit northwest of NGC 3166. It appears to be a disk galaxy with a faint nucleus. NED has no redshift data for it. Is it related to the other three? Then there's KDG 068 to the southeast of NGC 3166. It is classed as a dwarf galaxy though it is hard to tell from some of the debris from the two main interacting galaxies. North of NGC 3169 is a fuzzy horizontal streak I took to be debris. At its eastern end, NED using Sloan data sees a galaxy of 18th magnitude (that would be quite bright in my image) that is 12 seconds of arc by 2 seconds of arc. The entire streak is over a minute of arc long by about 0.2 minutes thick and might be 18th magnitude if condensed to a point. So is this what they show as being SDSS J101415.65+033413.3? To me, it is just more pieces ripped from the galaxy. I could repeat this with other tidal pieces as well. I think this just shows that automatic recognition of galaxies can fail under certain circumstances.

There are 7 quasars in the image. Some are marked UvES for Ultraviolet Excess Sources which are quasar candidates. One is marked as a quasar and as a galaxy with an AGN (Active Galactic Nucleus). It too is likely a quasar that is mostly hidden from our view by the core of the galaxy. Arp thought, and may still think, that a quasar's redshift was not cosmological and that they were ejected from highly disturbed galaxies such as these. Four close to one of them would likely be seen as significant to his theories. Yet another reason I'm surprised he didn't include them in his atlas. Though likely the quasars weren't recognized as such at that time.

Three asteroids are in the image.
(111576) 2002 AQ20 at magnitude 18.4
(32960) 1996 NO4 at magnitude 18.6
(266449) 2007 JE at magnitude 19.1

Unfortunately, I had that one stubborn set screw come loose again on the camera so the left side isn't well focused. Also seeing was poor. I need to redo this one with a lot more time but the way the weather has been this year it isn't looking likely this galaxy season.

Just too many galaxy and too little time.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC3166

NGC3184

NGC 3184 is a classic face on spiral galaxy in southern Ursa Major near one of the bears back feet. It made my list as it is one of the original Herschel 400 objects that I'm slowly working on. Also, it is a neat spiral that is overlooked by most imagers. William Herschel discovered it on the night of March 18, 1787. My visual notes with my 10" f/5 scope on May 4, 1984 at 10:15 CDT reads: Beautiful face on spiral, round with much arm detail. How did Messier miss this one? The nucleus is ill-defined. Hard to understand how this was a difficult object in an 8" scope." This refers apparently to the preliminary text I had of the list in which the person making the comments used an 8" scope and found this a difficult object. I no longer have that text. I went on to add: "Was he viewing from Central Park in NYC?."

In any case, the part about my finding the core ill-defined certainly isn't the case with my digital image. Though I had to watch the stretch of the core to preserve the spiral structure in to the very core. Most online images show it pretty well burned in with a lot of the spiral structure lost. In this case, both the redshift and Tully Fisher distance estimates are in close agreement. It is about 38 million light-years distant. Assuming that is correct I get a size of about 95,000 light-years though see faint hints of it extending another 15 million light-years to the south. I'd need more exposure time to verify that.

NED classifies it as SAB(rs)cd with HII. Radio shows a very strong bar in CO. While the bright arms do come from an area away from the core as if there were a bar I see none at visual wavelengths and the faint arm structure continues to spiral in to within a few seconds of arc of the core. The NGC Project goes with the visual and says Sc (no bar). I am picking up a few hints of pink HII regions but most are below my resolution even though this was a better night than average for seeing. Transparency was poor due to a haze, however. The haze likely stabilized the seeing. 6.5 magnitude HD 89053, an M2 giant cast a horrid red gradient over the image thanks to the haze layer preceding the 3" of snow that shut me down that night. This is likely why I didn't think the data worth processing. Fortunately, I'm getting better at dealing with such issues and pretty well eliminated it at the cost of some background faint fuzzies in the area of the star.

This active galaxy has had two or three supernova in the last 100 years. SN 1937F, SN 2010d and SN 1999gi. SN 2010d might have been an outburst of a Luminous Blue Variable rather than a SN. I don't know why they can't tell for sure which it was. LBV stars are interesting. For those wishing to read up on them, this paper might help: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1994PASP..106.1025H Or just think Eta Carinae. Its likely the most famous LBV.

The galaxy is also the home of two other NGC objects. NGC 3181 is certainly a bright HII region I've pointed to in the annotated image. NGC 3180 is harder to pin down. The NGC Project says: "NGC 3180 is a star cloud or HII region in NGC 3184's northwestern arm. The position in NGC (by Dreyer from LdR's observations) fits the star cloud better, but the HII region is brighter, though smaller. The number may well apply to both objects or simply the general area of the arm where they are found." I've pointed to both in the annotated image. I can't see either as an obvious candidate, however.

To the southeast of NGC 3184 is a galaxy that depending on which catalog you consult is either just a galaxy or a quasar or a galaxy with an AGN1 core or one with a Seyfert 1 core. Take your pick. It is known only by coordinates in each of these catalogs so I've only listed it as G/Q/AGN1/SY1. To the north near the top edge, a bit left of center is ASK 314681.0 which had two separate entries in NED. One as an AGN1 using only coordinates for a label and then as the ASK object as well as others again only by coordinates as a BLAGN candidate. That stands for Broad Line Active Galaxy Nucleus. The core is burned in my image so is very bright compared to the star disk around it. To the south of NGC 3184 is ASK 314329.0. It is listed as an AGN1 and appears starlike in my image but in the Sloan image, it has a faint bit of fuzz around it. Another galaxy with a super bright core.

This image was taken in 2014. A supernova was discovered by Koichi Itagaki in NGC 3184 on March 21, 2016. It is officially Supernova 2016bkv. I've wanted to take it ever since along with 2016bau discovered March 13 as it is in Arp 27. The first sucker holes didn't open until April 5UT -- and sucker holes they were! More on that in a bit.

The galaxy NGC 3184 is about 40 million light-years distant so the star actually exploded 40 million years ago; its light just now reaching us. In the animated image, it is the lower right of two stars to the upper left of the galaxy's core. See the animated link to see a before and after image. The star may be one of many in a small blue star cluster seen in the before image as a blue object. It appears to be on the upper right edge of this little blue blob of stars. This galaxy hosted other supernovae in 1999, 1937 and 1921. That's far more often than in most galaxies, ours included.

In the animated image a few stars in the galaxy will change brightness a bit. This is due to much poorer conditions the night the supernova was imaged. Field stars beyond the galaxy are all from the 2014 image so don't show this effect. I thought I had equalized the stars in both images, obviously that wasn't quite correct.

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

Related Designations for NGC3184

NGC3198

NGC 3198 is a classic grand design spiral galaxy in southern Ursa Major near the western back foot. Recent Cepheid measurements by the HST put it at 47.3 million light-years from earth. The redshift would indicate 41 million light-years so there is some agreement. Though NED lists some 17 other Cepheid measurements from earth-based scope that give values from 36.5 to 57.4 million light-years. But their average comes back to 47 million light-years so I'll go with the HST project's determination. The HST image of part of the galaxy is at:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/NGC_3198_Hubble_WikiSky.jpg

I imaged this one just because I had never imaged it before and because I thought I spotted an interesting distant galaxy cluster in the POSS plates to the west-northwest of NGC 3198. It is the cluster WHL J101858.1+453618 listed at 4.4 billion light-years. It is marked by GC 4.4 in the annotated image. NED shows it containing 21 galaxies. Many of these appear to be visible in my image. The position seems to be that of the largest and brightest member though it is shown to have a distance of only 4.0 billion light-years. Though both are photographic estimates. These give a ballpark figure at best so the difference isn't all that surprising.

Due to wanting to try to pick up members of this cluster I doubled my normal luminosity time. Instead of my normal 22.5 limiting magnitude this one goes far deeper. The quasar southwest of the NGC 3198 at 12.4 billion light-years is listed at magnitude 23.2.

Down in the lower left corner is a Blazar (BLZR). These are quasars in which the relativistic jet is pointed right at us. This causes rapid fluctuations in brightness. This also makes it a BRLG. This stands for Bright Radio Line Galaxy as seen by radio telescopes. This is a rather nearby one so bright and earned 29 separate designations in NED! I'll use the first one, B3 1018+456. Enter that in NED to see the rest.

In the lower right corner is a small, very fuzzy blue blob of a galaxy. It has a redshift that puts it about the same distance as far large NGC 3198, only 44 million light-years away. It must be some sort of dwarf Magellanic galaxy. NED lists its largest diameter at 0.32 minutes which would give it a size of only 4100 light-years. NGC 3198's diameter is 8.5 minutes. At 47 million light-years that would give a diameter of 116,000 light-years, about the size of our galaxy.

Anyone following my posts knows I keep finding, usually blue, galaxies not listed in NED even though many far fainter ones are. This image will be no exception. Toward the upper left, below a rather bright, white, star is such a blue galaxy. As usual, it is marked with a question mark. I just scanned the annotated image for blue galaxies not listed. It was the first one I tried! That caused me to try some more. Next 4 were listed at NED, just without redshift data. That's fine. But then the next one was another miss. It too is below a rather white star, though well below it. Look to the northwest, left of the galaxy cluster at 4.4 billion light-years. I quit looking after that.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC3198

NGC3205

NGC 3205 is one of three galaxies in the LDCE 0722 galaxy group. It consists of three mostly red and dead spiral galaxies all seen rather face on. They are located in the hind feet of Ursa Major about 320 to 330 million light-years from us. NGC 3205 was my main subject as it has plumes indicating it has either had a near collision with another galaxy or is still digesting something it ate. I favor the latter as nothing else in the area appears obviously disturbed but NGC 3507 has hints of a faint plume to the northeast and the plume of 3205 extends almost to 3507. NGC 3205 is shown simply as S? by NED. The NGC Project says only pec even though it is an obvious spiral. Seligman comes in with Sa?? pec. I don't know what 2 question marks mean. Including the faintest parts of the plumes, I get a size of about 225,000 light-years. Including only the obvious plumes it is 140,000 light-years in size, still a large galaxy. It is the reddest of the three. That may be due to its gas and dust being either ejected or heated thus stopping star formation as a result of its interaction with another galaxy some billion years ago or so.

NGC 3202 is listed at NED as Sb(r)a. The inner arms from the bar forming a ring that other arms come off from, two from the north end and one from the southern end. These arms are slightly blue indicating some but not much star formation is still going on there at least in the more recent past. The NGC Project, however, classifies it as SBa ignoring the ring. Seligman also ignores the ring but seems to love question marks showing it as SBa??. I measure it at about 110,000 light-years across.

NGC 3207 is shown as having an AGN at its core and is listed simply as S? by NED. The NGC Project, however, says simply pec and Seligman, true to its love of question marks says pec??. Including its faint halo, I get a size of about 160,000 light-years. So all three of these galaxies are quite large. NED shows a galaxy cluster with a count of 12 seen through the southwest edge of the galaxy. The photographic redshift puts it 4.57 billion light-years distant. But the bright cluster galaxy anchoring the group has a spectroscopic redshift of 3.88 billion light-years, putting it much closer. Either it isn't part of the cluster or the photographic redshift has a surprisingly large error. I don't know which or some combination is the true explanation.

All were discovered by William Herschel on February 3, 1788. None are in either of the Herschel 400 observing programs. Several dwarf galaxies that lie at the same distance can be seen scattered around the field as noted in the annotated image. Only one other normal galaxy is in the image that is obviously part of the same group though not listed as part of the LDCE 0722 group of three. That is UGC 5578 at the very bottom of my image. Shown as Scd: by NED it measures some 145,000 light-years across. It just seems smaller since it is seen close to edge on. It seems the most normal of the group to my eye.

I was surprised by how many rather bright galaxies weren't listed at NED or SIMBAD with other than positional designations. Those are simply listed as G in the in the annotated image. Same for quasars, Q, which also are listed only by position. A couple quasars have a z value of over 3 which places them over 11 billion light-years distant, that light was emitted when the universe was only a bit over 2 billion years old. The wavelengths we see were deep in the ultraviolet when emitted. Their wavelength stretched by more than 4 times by the universe's expansion over those 11+ billion years. One asteroid snuck in at the top of the image. It was moving rather fast in prograde motion so rather dim for its magnitude. Asteroids mid prograde motion are much faster than those in mid retrograde motion as they have to make up for time lost going backwards.

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

Related Designations for NGC3205

NGC3206

NGC 3206 is a strangely distorted galaxy in Ursa Major just west of the bowl of the dipper. It is quite nearby at about 60 million light-years by redshift and 66 million light-years by the median of 7 Tully-Fisher measurements. Using the latter distance it is a rather average size spiral at 47,000 light-years across its north-south axis. I don't find much on it and nothing on how it might have gotten its odd shape. Unusual the shape might be but not enough to garner a peculiar label as most classify it is an SBc or SBcd galaxy. It was discovered by William Herschel on April 8, 1793. It didn't make either of the Herschel 400 observing programs, probably due to its low surface brightness.

It has two apparent companions in my frame. NGC3220 at 61 million light-years by redshift is a nearly edge-on spiral with very blue star clouds at the ends of both the east and west ends. While NED and the NGC Project classify it as Sb or Sb: Seligman says Sd? Quite a disagreement unless that is a typo. It looks to my untrained eye as Sb is more likely the case. This one was also discovered by William Herschel the same night as NGC 3206. But then 97 years later on August 8, 1890 Lewis Swift reported it as a new galaxy even though the NGC had been released and his position, as well as Herschel's, was right on the galaxy. How Swift didn't notice this nor Dreyer when he entered it in the IC as IC 604 I don't know. But thanks to this slip it has both an NGC and IC number even though neither discoverer got the position wrong. The blue star clouds at each end make me wonder if it and 3206 didn't have a fast close encounter some time back. Like 3206 it isn't in either Herschel observing program either. It is much smaller than 3206 at about 21,000 light-years in size as seen from our sideways view.

The third NGC galaxy lies between these two and is NGC 3214. It is an S0/a galaxy and is obviously unrelated as it is some 6 times more distant. So while it appears much smaller than the other two NGC galaxies that is an illusion as it is about 72,000 light-years across. It was discovered by Ralph Copeland, an astronomer on the payroll of Lord Rosse who used the 72" scope to find this one on March 9, 1874.

It too has a companion at about the same distance (350 million light-years by redshift) that is an Sbc spiral with weakly defined arms that is cataloged as CGCG 290-031. It is some 66,000 light-years across assuming its redshift distance.

A highly distorted galaxy with a faint highly distorted arm or plume lies below NGC 3206. Conditions were poor the night I took this data with very low transparency and a super bright sky thanks to all the ice in the air at an ambient temperature of -36C. Thus the plume or arm doesn't begin to show like I'd expected it to. It is labeled as ASK 210636.0 and it too is at 360 million light-years so could be related to the others. Look around and you'll find a couple more at about this redshift distance. All are likely part of a widely separated galaxy group.

Also in the image is a quasar candidate shown as a UvES (Ultraviolet Excess Source) as well as a galaxy that NED considers a quasar at only 1.61 billion light-years. The galaxy shape is quite obvious in my image. Normally I'd expect a quasar to be so bright the underlying galaxy would be lost in its glare. So I have a problem with the quasar designation and have listed it as G/Q in the lower right or my image.

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

Related Designations for NGC3206

NGC3254

NGC 3254 is a nice spiral galaxy in Leo Minor about 76 million light-years distant by redshift and 94 million by non-redshift measurements. Using the shorter distance I get a size of 112,000 light-years. The greater distance its size is 142,000 light-years. That would make it unusually large so I'm going to go with the nearer distance and thus smaller size which still makes it larger than our galaxy. Also, like ours, it appears to have only a small bulge at its core. That could indicate a smaller than typical supermassive black hole at its center.

The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on March 13, 1785. It is in the second H400 observing program, my notes from that somehow got lost in the move up here 13 years ago. I never transcribed them to a computer file as I did the those from the original program. Where's a time machine when you need it?

One field galaxy in the image has a rather rare catalog designation KISSB. That stands for Kitt peak national observatory International Spectroscopic Survey Blue spectral region. I assume they left off the final S for spectral region because that would make it KISSBS and they don't want to be known for BS. Though Bemidji State University is only about 40 miles north of me and it gives Bachelor of Science degrees so you can get a BS degree from BUS. not only that their team mascot for boys and girls teams makes them the Beavers.

I again ran into what appears to be a mistake in Ned's database. There's a near point source east of the upper end of NGC 3254 that NED says is a galaxy but it puts the verified spectroscopic redshift at 3.156588. While I can see some quasars at that distance (11.68 billion light-years look back time) there's no chance I'd see a galaxy at that distance, The HST has to look long and hard to see them at that redshift. I've labeled it G? and (Q) for my judgment it really is a quasar and Ned's designation as a galaxy is true only because quasars are so bright it dominates and hides most any trace of the galaxy it is in.

Two asteroids were in the far eastern side of the image frame when it was taken. One was bright enough for its color trails to be seen against the background sky glow. I took the two blue and 2 of the 4 luminance frames on the eastern side of the meridian, flipped to the other side and took the rest. Most say to save red to last since it isn't hurt by poor seeing as much as the other colors. This is true and I used to do this. But then I realized high resolution of color data isn't at all that important but getting the intensity of the colors correct is. This way I balance red and blue at about the same altitude. Green is by far the least important color, I can compensate easily for too little green so now save it to last. I found on difficult nights this helps. This wasn't such a night but it is now the order I do things, saving green rather than red for the lowest data taken. That plus eXcalibrator make short work of color balance.

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

Related Designations for NGC3254

NGC3294

There are three NGC objects in the image located in northeastern Leo Minor. NGC 3294 was my main target as a rather photogenic spiral galaxy that is in the original Herschel 400 list having been discovered by William Herschel on March 17, 1787. It is 85 million light-years distant by redshift and 93 million light-years by the median of many mostly Tully Fisher measurements. The other NGC galaxy is NGC 3304 also discovered by William Herschel the same night as he found NGC 3294. It is nearly 3 times as distant at 330 million light-years by redshift. The third NGC object is NGC 3291. It was discovered by Guillaume Bigourdan nearly 100 years later on April 5, 1885. The reason Herschel didn't "find" it is it is just a field star. Even Bigourdan couldn't find it when he tried to verify it a few nights later. On a poor night, a star at the magnitude limit of the scope can look like a fuzzy galaxy and fool even a rather expert observer. His position was precisely on the star so why he didn't scratch it when he couldn't verify it I don't know but the NGC is littered with such stellar finds.

More puzzling is that the Sloan Survey and thus NED show a distant quasar candidate visible through NGC 3294 which I've marked on the annotated image. It has a photographically determined redshift of 1.475 which puts it over 9 billion light-years distant. The only problem is I see only a blue star cloud at its position in my image and in the Sloan Survey image. I couldn't see any hint of a point source in the Sloan image. Though I do see a possible starlike point at about the right spot just beside the star cloud in a stack of two UV images of the core region.

Toward the lower left of the image is the galaxy ASK 498130.0 at 1.53 billion light-years. It appears to have some large plumes or drawn out arms that come from an otherwise compact elliptical-like source. I wish seeing had been better to get a better idea of what is going on here. It looks interesting if it could be seen better. I say this because the PSF of the bright core hints at it containing two near point sources. I'm thinking this might be two colliding galaxies with the resulting plumes. Something to revisit on a far better night.

The annotated image shows all objects for which NED had redshift data. I also marked a very faint, low surface brightness galaxy listed as SDSS J103715.79+372035.8. It is near the center of the image. I thought it a bit of noise from a bad flat but it does show faintly in the Sloan image and is listed as a galaxy but without any redshift data.

Seeing was poor for his image making for a rather soft image. Unfortunately, that's been the norm of late.

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

Related Designations for NGC3294

NGC3299

NGC 3299, NGC 3306 and CGCG 065-069 are a trio of unrelated galaxies in Leo just west of the M95-96-105 group. Being unrelated I'll cover them separately. NGC 3299 is a low surface brightness galaxy with little detail seen even though it is face on to us. While its distance by redshift is 46 million light-years that is likely too far. Tully Fisher measurements put it only 18 million light-years away. If the latter it is only 12,600 light-years across though it is 32,300 light-years across if the larger distance is accepted. Quite a disparity. It is classed as SAB(s)dm at NED and S(B)dm at the NGC Project, which makes it a barred spiral though the bar is extremely difficult to see. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784 using his 18.7" reflector. Since I've seen reports of it requiring averted vision to be seen in a 17.5" scope today it must have been near Herschel's visual limit when discovered. Several galaxies can be seen right through its thin disk. I've marked the one that has redshift distance data. I'm a bit suspicious about the distant galaxies entry in NED however. It's distance of 3.1 billion light-years seems reasonable enough, what bothers me is NED classifying it. Since it shows as only a couple pixels in size how they determine it to be an Sdm galaxy I can't fathom. Of all the galaxies at this distance I've seen in NED this is the first they listed with a classification.

NGC 3306 is sometimes called a companion of NGC 3299 but that is only a line of sight illusion. It's distance by redshift is 150 million light-years and grows to nearly 170 million light-years by Tully Fisher measurements. A rather good agreement this time. It is classed as SB(s)m? by NED and Sc? by the NGC Project. Even though much further away it is easier to see visually by all reports though oddly both William and John Herschel missed it when looking at the nearby but far fainter NGC 3299. Its discovery had to wait for another 102 years, until 1886 when Lewis Swift found it in a 16" refractor. I've seen it, just barely, in my 10" f/5 scope but not NGC 3299 even though it is listed as being a magnitude fainter than NGC 3299. It's light is spread out over a much smaller area making it much easier to find.

CGCG 065-069 is a more normal looking spiral but its two arms are quite unsymmetrical. It is classed as Sc by NED. It is by far the most distant of the trio. Also the one I was able to find the least on.

There's a lot going on in the image as shown by the annotated image. Between the two NGC galaxies is a pair of very blue galaxies. The western one has a distance of 460 million light-years. No distance data is available for the one abutting it to the east. Are they a colliding pair? I see no plumes so they are likely further away from each other than they appear or this is their initial meeting so there hasn't been times for plumes or distortion to set in.

Below NGC 3299 near the bottom of the image is ASK 430799 at 2.16 billion light-years. It does have some interesting plumes which make it nearly 200,000 light-years across. Unfortunately I found nothing more on it however. The ASK catalog was new to me and new to NED as they too didn't list it as a catalog when I clicked on the link to tell me more about the catalog it came back with it being a designation recognized by NED. A bit more digging and I found it stands for "Automatic Spectroscopic K-means-based classification" and NED now has over 700,000 entries from this catalog yet doesn't seem to know it as yet. So what does this mean? You can read all about it (put on the hip waders) at: http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/714/1/487/pdf/0004-637X_714_1_487.pdf

Several galaxy clusters are in the image. Only those with a defined Big Cluster Galaxy are shown in the annotated image as the rest were too uncertain for me to include. Seeing was poor for this one and got worse during the imaging with the blue frames really tore up with 6" seeing which makes separating galaxy from star difficult so I didn't attempt it. If the distance estimate was done photographically I've indicated that with a "p" after the distance. Usually the distance for the BCG was slightly different and often did have spectroscopic redshift data (no "p"). Likely this latter distance estimate is more accurate.

The distance to quasars is so confusing due to relativity issues that besides a light travel time distance I've listed their redshift z value showing how much their light is red shifted. A z of 1 means the wavelength has doubled in value due to its expansion velocity. 2 means it is tripled. So a spectral line in the near ultra violet is now in the near infra red part of the spectrum for a z=2 quasar. We are seeing its deep ultra violet light shifted into the visual spectrum. Even so a quasar with a z=2.155987 appears very blue in the image indicating it is very bright in the very deep part of the ultra violet spectrum. Now that is hot!

There are three asteroids in the image. See the annotated image for their details.

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

Related Designations for NGC3299

NGC3319

NGC 3319 is a barred spiral galaxy in Ursa Major about 45 million light-years away. It is odd in having a bright, high surface brightness bar with low surface brightness arms. Most of the current star formation is going on in the bar and some in small regions of the disk, mostly in the southern arm. NED classes it as SB(rs)cd while the NGC Project says SBc. Both agree it has HII emission from mainly the bar and southern arm which shows many bright blue HII regions in my image compared to the northern arm. It is quite symmetrical in the bar, just not in the disk. Radio shows the HI to be very asymmetrical as well. Why, considering it is a lone galaxy, is a puzzle. It was discovered by William Herschel on February 3, 1788. It is in the second H400 observing program.

In the upper right corned of my image is a galaxy cluster with a large bright cluster galaxy, likely a cD galaxy, at its core. It, and the galaxy are listed at 1.6 billion light-years. NED shows two entries for this cluster: WHL J103801.8+414625 with 23 galaxies and WHL J103801.8+414625 with 43 galaxies. No size is shown for either. NED describes the latter as a "fossil group". This term is used for clusters in which the major cD galaxy is the result of mergers of smaller galaxies in the cluster then for billions of years has had no further mergers since the initial round of mergers created the cD. This one appears to have a rather large edge on spiral with very unsymmetrical arms. This might indicate activity in the group after all. Though it is slightly closer by redshift so possibly isn't a member. The difference is small enough to be due to relative motion however. It quite likely is a cluster member. You can read more about these clusters at: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMCFFOFGLE_index_0.html
http://www.gemini.edu/node/172
http://www.gemini.edu/node/258

It appears this cluster is part of Abell 1056. I've marked the center of that cluster as NED has it. It is listed as 24 minutes in diameter so would include this group. Only problem is the cluster is listed at 1.1 billion light years not 1.6 and there are only 2 galaxies, even further east, with about (1.0) that distance. This is an estimate and if based on brightness of the fossil group galaxies would understate the distance. He tended to estimate distance based on the brightness of the tenth brightest member. That would be a member of the fossil group. It is listed with a richness class of 1 which has 50 to 79 galaxies. So likely it is just his estimate that is in error. Other than the cluster the field is rather unremarkable.

As is often the case its the omissions from NED that I have trouble with. There's a large smudge of a galaxy just east of the lone quasar in the image (southeast of NGC 3319). It is real, not a reflection as it shows in the POSS plates. But NED has nothing at that position. If you go up from the smudge and a tad right a very faint galaxy is seen. It is in NED at magnitude 19.1. Way wrong as the quasar is also listed at 19.1. But the integrated magnitude of the smudge would be about 19.1. Have they merged two entries? No filter is given for the magnitudes, usually that means they were taken with a V (green) filter. But it could be the filter for the quasar was very different from the galaxy and that accounts for the difference. Though they should have mentioned that.

Down and left a ways from the quasar and smudge galaxy is a cluster of very faint galaxies. Individually most, if not all (I only sampled a few), are listed in NED but no cluster is located at that position. Sure looks like one to me. Unfortunately, none had redshift data so its distance is unknown, at least to NED.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=10x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC3319