NGC4013

NGC 4013 is a rather bright edge-on spiral galaxy in Ursa major just over the western border of Canes Venatici. At 55 million light years it is rather close but also smaller than some other famous edge-on galaxies like NGC 4565 which is on my redo list if the weather ever cooperates. Edit: Never retaken as yet. In the meantime, this one will have to do. It was discovered by William Hershel on February 6, 1788. It is in the second H400 observing program.

Hubble took a rather famous shot of this galaxy back in 2001 so I'll just refer you to the text with that image. http://hubblesite.org/image/1022/news_release/2001-07 Note the Hubble image is "upside down" compared to mine. I have north up while they show it with south up. The Hubble camera can't see the entire galaxy at once so imaged what is the right half of it in my image.

Edit: This is an early image with all the processing problems I had with insufficient software back then. Also, my imaging technique wasn't all that great at that time either.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10'x2 RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC4013

NGC4026

This field attracted me as a study in the contrast between a high surface brightness galaxy and a very low surface brightness galaxy. Both are about 50 million light-years distant and are found in Ursa Major about a degree northwest of more famous Arp 18 (NGC 4088). They are considered members of the M109 galaxy group. NGC 4026 is an edge on S0 galaxy. Note that the intensity of the disk drops away from the core then brightens again before fading normally. This bright region may indicate a ring if seen face on. Is the ring due to dust hiding the inner parts of the disk or just a higher star population? Papers I saw disagree. A radio-based paper said it found no dust. Visual observations find dust. Maybe it is both. Certainly, I can't answer this from my image. Interestingly, older papers see this one as a hidden Sa spiral but newer ones all say S0. HI radio observations show an HI tail heading south from the galaxy. Its cause seems unknown as far as I could find. Did nearby DDO 102 have anything do do with this? I rather doubt it as its mass seems quite low but it may be dense with unseen dark matter and thus be able to cause a plume in NGC 4026. Some very low surface brightness galaxies have a lot more dark matter than their brightness would indicate though most don't seem to have enough to cause this plume. At least not to my way of thinking. Also, it doesn't point to DDO 102. It may be due to something it ate long ago. I found no paper trying to explain it, I'm just reporting it exists.

NGC 4026 was discovered by William Herschel on April 12, 1789. It is in the original H400 program. My notes from that on April 27, 1984 with my a 12.5" f/5 at 150x under excellent conditions reads "Starlike nucleus in what looks to be an edge on but is classed E8-S0 in Burnham's. No dust lane seen which agrees with the latter classification. Seems 12th magnitude or a bit brighter." A paper was written since my observation rule out it being an elliptical galaxy. I don't see that starlike nucleus mentioned in my notes but assume that has to do with the stretch I used to bring out DDO 102.

The low surface brightness galaxy is DDO 102 in the David Dunham Observatory's catalog of low surface brightness spiral galaxies. it is also known as UGC 6956 and PGC 37682 among other designations. The core is rather faint and its arms very faint. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find much on it or why it is so low luminosity. I assume star formation is weak yet the arms are surprising blue compared to the central bar region. I see no real core just the bar with some star clouds in it. The arm structure is ill-defined. This may be due to it being barely above my noise level. I couldn't find any deep images of this that showed any more than my image.

Assuming a distance of 50 million light-years I measure NGC 4026 at about 66,000 light-years across. DDO 102 is a bit harder to define but my best estimate is about 37,000 light-years.

After constant complaining about how bad the nights have been this one was taken on a better than average night, at least better than I've had in some time. The annotated image shows a galaxy near the top NED lists at magnitude 22.9. It's barely visible. Still, this and the seeing is well above the norm for the last few years. While taken the same night as IC 320 and NGC 0644 conditions went bad after NGC 644 then cleared with much better seeing and transparency for this image near dawn. I'd have taken more data but dawn ended the night and the following nights were much worse. I did take two extra blue frames due to the faint arms of DDO 102 but in dawn skies. While I used them I don't think they helped significantly.

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

Related Designations for NGC4026

NGC4038

Arp 244/NGC4038-9 are almost too low for my scope to see. Certainly too low to see clearly being below my normal 15 degree south limit. But they are so interesting I had to try anyway. These are known as the Antenna, clamshell or Ring Tail Galaxies. NGC 4038 and 4039 are a much pictured pair of colliding galaxies. Massive star birth has been triggered by the collision and huge tidal arms (the antennae) pulled out of them. When galaxies collide the dust and gas do collide but the stars do not. They are just far too small and too far apart for that to happen. But the gravity field is so strong that it can tear stars out of the galaxies and throw them across the universe as seen in the two tails of these galaxies. If your monitor can see into the darkness well enough you can see the lower (longer tail) actually starts to curve back on itself. These two are thought to be about 65 million light years away in the constellation of Corvus. The Hubble telescope took this photo of the upper galaxy in my shot (NGC 4039). http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/1997/34/images/d/formats/full_jpg.jpg and http://cseligman.com/text/atlas/ngc4038noao.jpg
Hubble can resolve individual stars in a galaxy at this distance thanks to not having to look through our atmosphere.

Due to clouds I had very limited color data which shows up as rather blotchy color. Two asteroids decided to wander through my view
Upper left: (15297) 1992 CF Mag 16.4
Lower left: (54283) 2000 JG48 Mag 17.2

The "stars" you see in the galaxies are really huge clusters of super massive stars created by the collision. Some are still shrouded in their Hydrogen and dust cloud from which they formed. The hydrogen glowing its characteristic pink-red color. Others have completely used up the hydrogen and glow blue though some hydrogen emission can be seen on their edges. Note I've pushed the color to extremes here to show these features. The true colors would be much more muted if your eyes could actually see them. Which they never could from any vantage point as they would be just too faint.

The Galaxies were discovered by William Herschel on February 7, 1785 and is in the original Herschel 400 observing program. My notes from that made on April 16, 1985 using my 10" f/5 at 50x hampered by how low it was even in Nebraska and the extinction from high humidity reads "Large, fairly easy object, mottled a little brighter toward the center. This was limited to NGC 4038 as 4039 wasn't in the program. I didn't see the tails."

This was taken back early 2007 when my imaging techniques were poor. It is severely photon starved. I've had it on the redo list for years but conditions just haven't made this possible. Until then this will have to do.

14" LX 200R @ f/10, L=6x5' RGB=1x5', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC4038

NGC4051

NGC 4051 is a very well studied spiral in Ursa Major only some 43 to 46 million light-years away. It is considered midway between a true spiral and a barred spiral by some sources. It is one of 6 galaxies Carl Seyfert studied in 1943 that later became classic Seyfert Galaxies. While most sources consider it a Seyfert 1 galaxy I find papers say it is 1.25, 1.5 and 1.8 among other definitions. The Seyfert classification can be considered a quasar that is no longer active enough to meet that definition but still has an active supermassive black hole. It is considered one of the least luminous core Seyfert's known. While the Seyfert designation refers to the activity of the black hole at its center I was pleasantly surprised at how many HII regions popped out in my simple LRGB image without the need to use any H alpha light to bring them out. One region, however, appears white. This caused many galaxy catalogs to pick it up as a galaxy. It is noted as ASK 318879.0 in the annotated image but has many other galaxy designations. Still, NED says it is an HII region, not a galaxy and its redshift is similar to that of NGC 4051. On the other hand ASK 318868.0 in the southern part of the galaxy appears to be a true galaxy at 72 million light-years.

I put NGC 4051 on my list because many sources call it a 3 armed spiral which was one of Arp's classifications for his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. One source calls it 4 armed. But to me, these extra arms appear more like arm segments and a split arm (which was another Arp category). NED lists 48 different designations for this galaxy, a good indication of how well studied it is.

This one was discovered by William Herschel on February 6, 1788. It is in the original H400 program. My note from that with my 10" f/5 on April 20, 1985 on a humidity hurt night at 100x says, "Large oval halo coming off of a highly elongated central core. Might be a barred spiral? Large diffuse halo, best seen with averted vision."

The annotated image lists all objects NED had a redshift value for but for one galaxy cluster with very vague coordinates and nothing obvious showing in the area that I could use to point to it.

I ran into a very unique processing issue with this one. The red data was taken on a night of very poor seeing. So poor I gave up and took the other colors a different night. The luminance, however, was taken on a rather good night. When I went to process the color data I found the seeing during the red image had moved the stars every which way compared to their position on the blue and green images. Not only were they larger on the red image some were west of their true position, others east, north or south etc. This resulted in some very mismatched stars that even RegiStar couldn't handle. You will see various red and blue sides to stars at rather random distribution though in any one small area all seem off in one direction just at different amounts. I "fixed" the most serious of these but it would have taken all year to fix them all individually. Oddly this didn't seem to bother the galaxy itself. Maybe next spring I'll redo the color data to fix this issue. (Edit: So far it hasn't happened) For now, I have to remember that while I can take color data on poorer nights than luminance there is a limit to how far I can take that and get a usable image.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=7x10' RGB=3x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC4051

NGC4068

NGC 4068 is an irregular starburst galaxy in Ursa Major. It is thought to be at the end of its starburst phase. NED classes it as IrrAm while the NGC project just says Irr. Redshift says it is about 18 million light-years away but other measurements put it closer with 13 to 14 million light-years being the currently accepted figure that I was able to find. I've shown both on the annotated image. The HST took an image of part of it as part of a three galaxy series of dwarf irregular starburst galaxies; NGC 4068, NGC 4163 and IC 4662. I've imaged the first two. The IC galaxy is only visible from southern skies so always far below my horizon. The HST article is at: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2009/19/ Only part of the galaxy fits its limited field of view. You can read all about it at that site which saves me a lot of typing.

Below and left of NGC 4068 is SDSS J120431.81+522749.0. It is listed in the 2MASS catalog of IR sources. It looks rather peculiar. All NED says about it is that it has an AGN at its core. While this doesn't necessarily mean it is the result of interaction it appears that it is a likely merger candidate with the very odd arm structure and plumes. The northern plume is rather bright but the southern needed a lot more time to bring out as it is just visible in my image. I'd love to see what Hubble would see looking at this one. At over a billion light-years it is a rather big galaxy. From the end to end of the plumes it is about 70 arc seconds in size. At its distance of 1.089 billion light-years that would be a diameter of 370,000 light-years! It appears to be somewhat tilted to our line of sight.

South of NGC 4068 is the galaxy cluster GMBCG J180.99631+52.47507 which contains only 8 members in an unknown area according to NED. Its position is also that of the Bright Cluster Galaxy (BCG) that anchors the cluster.

Further south is the core of Abell 1457. NED lists it as a galaxy cluster of richness class 0 and a distance of 840 million light-years. Richness class 0 means 30 to 49 galaxies. No diameter is given for the cluster. Galaxies of this distance are scattered across the image so apparently, it is quite large considering the core is near the south edge of the image. I centered the label over the listed center of the cluster.

To the west (right) of NGC 4068 is the galaxy cluster GMBCG J180.73018+52.62528 at 4.2 billion light-years. It's BCG has the same position. The cluster is listed as having 13 members. Again, no size is listed. In this case, I do see what appears to be several members in the area. I had to put the label to the left so as not hide some possible faint members.

To the northeast edge of the image is the galaxy cluster WHL J120503.3+524355 at 3.1 billion light-years though its BCG has the exact same coordinates it is listed at 3.2 billion light-years. Why I don't know. The cluster is listed as having 15 members. As usual, no diameter is given

The galaxy cluster in the bottom left corner is GMBCG J181.46298+52.46936 at 3.1 billion light-years. In this case, the BCG has the same position and nearly but not exactly the same redshift. The difference is in the next decimal point and insignificant compared to measurement errors but I do find it odd when they differ.

Even closer to the southeast corner is WHL J120559.1+522915 at 3.2 billion light-years. While there appears to be a BCG at the exact coordinates of the cluster it isn't listed in NED. NED only lists the cluster which it says has 30 members in an unknown area. Though within one second of arc of the cluster position is the 20th magnitude galaxy, SDSS J120559.05+522915.9. Since the cluster's position is listed with an uncertainty of 1.5" but the galaxy's position is listed to an accuracy of 0.5" the two positions likely are the same. Oddly I measure the galaxy as being at the location of the cluster rather than the other way around. Though my software might be fooled by the star directly to the south. I've had that type of error before. NED shows no redshift data for the galaxy.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=5x10' RGB=2x10x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC4068

NGC4088

Arp 18/NGC 4088 is in Arp's category for detached segments. I take it to be the piece on the northeastern end. It has a redshift that's 595 km/s while the galaxy has a redshift of 757 km/s So could it be an entirely separate galaxy? Or is the difference due to that part of the galaxy rotating toward us? NED considers it part of the galaxy. A southwestern clump has a similar difference but is receding. For this reason, I am going with NED that it is a part of the galaxy. Since NGC 4088 doesn't appear to be interacting with NGC 4085 at the bottom of my image the question remains as to what caused this odd detached piece?

NED classifies NGC 4088 as SAB(rs)bc HII, the NGC Project agrees as does Seligman. A very rare agreement for all three! The galaxy was discovered by William Herschel on March 9, 1788. NGC 4085 is classified by NED as SAB(s)c:? HII as does the NGC Project. Seligman is silent as to its classification. NGC 4085 was also discovered by William Herschel but on April 12, 1789, over a year later. Both are in the original Herschel 400 list. My comments about Arp 18 (I didn't know it was an Arp galaxy at the time) from May 4, 1984 on an excellent night with my 10" f/5 at powers up to 150x reads: "Bright easy oval, somewhat brighter to the northeast (detached segment?) Nucleus ill-defined." My entry for NGC 4085 the same night with the same scope reads: "Small faint oval with bright center. Fits in the same 150x field with NGC 4088. Nice pair." The last two words were penciled in at a later date and are not part of the computer file, only the printout.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10'x2 RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Related Designations for NGC4088

NGC4096

NGC 4096 is a rather nice spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. It is 14 degrees almost due west of M51. Some claim it is a member of the same group that M51 is in. If so I measure their projected separation as 9 million light-years. NGC 4096 is rather strongly tilted toward being on edge which makes seeing its detail more difficult. Still, it is obviously asymmetrical with the northern half smaller than the southern. This holds for radio as well as visual light. Thus it appears the core is shifted well above its center. While true of the bright disk of the galaxy the disk can be traced faintly much further. In fact, I trace it as extending a bit over 4' of arc to the north of the core and only 3.75' to the south meaning the north may go further from the core, just that it does so very faintly with few stars in the disk. NED classifies it as SAB(rs)c with HII regions. It is in the second Herschel 400 observing program having been discovered by William Herschel on March 9, 1788. Dreyer's description: pretty bright, very large, much elongated at a 32-degree angle.

While NED puts its distance at 36 million light-years other sources say 21 to 42 million light-years. I don't understand the wide range given. Using NED's distance I get a diameter, including the faint extensions, of a bit over 80,000 light-years making it a respectable spiral galaxy. The field contains only very distant background galaxies. I didn't try to identify all that NED had distance data on as they were very faint and barely show in the JPG image. I did include a few of them anyway. A good number of much brighter galaxies in the image had no distance data and were not annotated. Being well north of the ecliptic no asteroids were picked up in the image. It was discovered by William Herschel on March 9, 1788. It is in the second H400 program.

For such an easily imaged galaxy I was surprised how few images of it by amateurs I found.

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

Related Designations for NGC4096

NGC4102

NGC 4102 is a rather strange spiral galaxy in Ursa Major southwest of the bowl of the Big Dipper, not far from the far more well-known M109. It is about 50 million light-years away. I found little consensus on its distance. In fact, I found two different radial velocities giving two different results. Other techniques give even more results. All range in the 47 to 95 million light-year range. Most center around 50 to 60 million light-years. It was discovered by William Herschel on April 12, 1789. My log entry from the original H400 project made on May 4, 1984 using a 12.5" f/5 scope from the New Mexican badlands on a very good night says; "Bright nufleus, tilted spiral with some arm detail seen. About 12th magnitude."

What caused me to put this one on my strange galaxy list is it seems to have three different orientations of its disk. The very core is oriented nearly north-south. The outer ring is rotated about 30 degrees counterclockwise and the inner disk between the core and outer ring turned another 25 degrees counterclockwise. The entire disk appears warped to me but this may be due to the triple axes of symmetry and thus an illusion. Oddly I found no papers discussing these odd features. The inner disk is quite red with a complex set of dust bands sort of spiraling out. Beyond this the outer ring has a blue band of knots with some HII regions I pull out as pink even without using H alpha data. Beyond this the ring turns red again. So seems to have this ring of star formation. There's a bright object I first took for a star near the edge of the galaxy to the southwest. But it is oval. NED shows it to be a galaxy but has no redshift data on it. Could it be the cause of some or all of the galaxies oddities? A bit beyond this compact galaxy is what I take to be a very distant red galaxy just above a red star. Unfortunately it isn't in NED at all. It is clearly a galaxy. The annotated image shows others with a question mark as well that are not in NED even though they lie near far fainter galaxies that are picked up. I didn't search for these, just ran into them wondering if I could find redshift data.

Several galaxy clusters are in the image. I marked one that had no core galaxy to point to. In a couple other cases there was a core galaxy at that point but NED had no redshift data on it. Since in all cases where a core galaxy did have redshift data it was different than the photographically determined redshift of the cluster those with only one value are all the value for the cluster, not the galaxy.

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

Related Designations for NGC4102

NGC4108

NGC 4108 is a triple galaxy system in Draco about 120 million light-years distant. It actually is a group of 4 galaxies, one is not an NGC galaxy so doesn't carry the NGC 4108 catalog entry. There's a faint indication the NGC 4108 triplet have interacted in the past. It was NGC 4108B that attracted my interest to the group. It appears to be a face on spiral galaxy, classed SAB(s)d pec?, that has a disrupted arm structure and a dust lane right across its core. That makes it look like two half spirals that are merging. Even the core is quite blue indicating star formation has been recent and plentiful in recent times. The CGCG says of it: "Blue post-eruptive disrupted spiral with compact knots and bars."

NGC 4108 lies below it and shows distorted arms apparently pulled toward NGC 4108B. Also, a note at NED says "NGC 4108 and NGC 4108B appear joined by an H I bridge [Fig. 13(c)]; however, as the size of the bridge is only on the order of a beam width, most of it could be due to beam smearing." It is classed as (R')SAc. It was discovered on April 3, 1832 by John Herschel.

NGC 4108A lies west of the other two. It is classed as SBbc:. The arm structure seems rather weak and certainly not symmetrical. It is apparently more disturbed when seen at radio frequencies. A note at NED says: "NGC 4108A has a highly warped H I disk [Fig. 13(d)], with the major axes of the outer parts of the H I disk being misaligned (sic) by ~45^deg^ with respect to the optical major axis. The velocity field is peculiar in that at the southern tip the axis of rotation curves in the opposite direction one would expect from the warp in the H I disk."

The fourth member of the group, UGCA 272 is listed as E0/S0. It appears rather featureless and nearly white in color but does have an active core since it is listed as having a narrow line active galactic nucleus (NLAGN). Something has stirred up its core to high activity that is mostly hidden from our direct view.

The image contains quite a few quasars and quasar candidates (UvES), 11 of them. Most only have a photographically determined redshift (noted by a "p" after the distance) which isn't as accurate as a spectroscopic redshift. You'll see "pred" after the distance to one galaxy. That is a predicted redshift whatever that means.

NED shows three galaxy clusters in the image. One that is barely visible a bit northwest of NGC 4108A. More obvious is the pair to the west of NGC 4108. Though I'm not sure it if it is one cluster with two designations or two separate ones at virtually the same distance. There are two bright, large galaxies though only the southern one is listed as being a Bright Cluster Galaxy even though both are listed at the same coordinates as the cluster they anchor. In any case, there are quite a few galaxies at their distance (about 1.5 billion light-years) not only around the two big galaxies but across the image but for the lower left corner region. No size was given for either cluster, only a count of 14 and 13 members.

As usual for this year clouds and haze really did a number on the depth of this image. It is a good 1.5 magnitudes short of my normal limit. It didn't help that I forgot to turn on temperature compensation and a warm front went through as the image was being taken. Even focusing at every filter change (20 minutes) wasn't enough to keep up with the rising temperature which kept defocusing the image, especially at the corners. Corners suffer most when the temperature rises, core loses if it falls and isn't compensated for. Between the two issues, this one needs revisiting. Also, one of the two red frames is very weak. While I'm listing it as using 2 red frames the result is really very close to only one being used.

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

Related Designations for NGC4108

NGC4111

The NGC 4111 galaxy group also known as WBL 380 consists of 20 galaxies according to NED though I find no size for the group. NED places the group at a redshift distance of 42 million light-years which isn't the redshift of any galaxy in the image. NGC 4111 itself NED lists at 47 million light-years with a Tully Fisher distance of about 52 million light-years. NGC 4111 is a nearly featureless spindle galaxy with HII emission and LINER spectrum. It is about 60,000 light-years long at its redshift distance. It was discovered by William Herschel on January 14, 1788. It is in the original Herschel 400 list. My comment from April 18, 1984 using a 12.5" reflector belonging to my astronomy club reads: "Faint galaxies to the south in the same 50x field. Seems to be an edge on but no dust lane seen. Herschel book calls it 'Elliptical with distinct outer arms.' How can this be when ellipticals don't have arms?!?!?!" I didn't mention the NGC galaxies to the northeast. There are only 4 other galaxies in my image with a similar redshift. All the others lie significantly further away. Apparently to get the 20 count for the group distance is ignored? Papers using radio telescopes describe a dust band at right angles to its major axis and visual report a peanut shaped core. That could indicate a recent merger with the dust showing a hint of a polar ring resulting from the merger. I was unable to bring this out, however.

The other galaxies likely physically part of the group in my image are NGC 4117, NGC 4118, UGC 7089 and UGC 7094. NGC 4117 was also discovered by William Herschel but on a different night, February 6, 1788. It's not in either Herschel 400 program. It too is a rather featureless S0 type galaxy. It has a dust lane parallel to the semi-major axis and a SY2 core by some papers. This could indicate it too is digesting a recent NED puts it at 54 million light-years by redshift which makes it only 29,000 light-years in size. Even smaller NGC 4118 lies closer with a redshift distance of 40 million light-years giving it a size of only 7,000 light-years. It was discovered April 20, 1857 by R. J. Mitchell an assistant of William Parsons better known as the Earl of Rosse. One problem with this is according to the same source he worked for the Earl from 1852 to 1855 yet the discovery was 1857. Another source gives the discoverer as Lord Rosse himself though nearly all he claimed to discover were really discovered by his assistants from my research. I'm "Lost in Space" on this one.

UGC 7089 and UGC 7094 are both classified as Sdm: galaxies and are seen rather edge on. UGC 7089 has several nice bright blue star clouds and is the larger of the two. They lie at almost the same redshift of 46 and 47 million light-years respectively. That gives them a size of 53,000 and 30,000 light-years respectively.

The remaining NGC galaxy, NGC 4109 lies much further away at 330 million light-years. So while small in angular size is really 63,000 light-years in diameter making it actually slightly larger than NGC 4111. NGC 4109 was discovered by Bindon Stoney, another of the Earl's assistants on April 21, 1841. It has a companion MCG +07-25-025. It appears to me to be a rather disorganized barred spiral though NED doesn't attempt to classify it. There's a third galaxy at about the same distance in the upper right corner of my image that is much smaller in size. They must be related.

There are a number of galaxies at about 73 million light-years in the image. NED does show a group at that distance, SDSSCGB 33732, but with only 4 members. I see 11 in my image.

There are a couple galaxy clusters in the image I could identify and some I couldn't. The two only have photographic distance estimates for both the cluster and the bright cluster galaxy I use to mark the location. The one UvES object is a quasar candidate with only a photographic redshift.

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

Related Designations for NGC4111