Bill S

While looking around the wonderfully rich galaxy hunting ground of Virgo I came across NGC 4535 and decided it was quite pretty. I don't know if that makes it interesting.

This is a fine barred spiral (SAB(s)c) or SBc). It's about 54 million light years away and has the nickname The Lost Galaxy or The Lost Galaxy of Copeland. (Leland S. Copeland nicknamed it this in the 1950s because of its ghostly appearance in small telescopes.) Observations of Cepheid variables using the Hubble telescope have helped confirm its distance.

While reading up about this object I came across some posts that referred to it as McLeish's object.

e.g.

https://in-the-sky.org/data/object.php?id=NGC4535

I am convinced this is incorrect. McLeish's object is at declination -66 in Pavo. See for example:

https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/CATALOGS/naga.html

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/301165/pdf

The galaxy is at a great angle for appreciating its shape. A fine example of a barred spiral in my opinion.

Bill

Martin Meredith wondered about the colours of the stars flanking the galaxy. I decided to have a look. The focus was a bit off on this LRGB snap but it does not seem to show a lot of colour. It might be better to try different (shorter) exposures when looking for colours to avoid saturation.

Checking the reference data for these stars, what I saw was not unreasonable. The left hand one is HD109417 and is class K0 so a bit more orange than our sun but as a K0 it's only just in the K class over the border from the G class. The right hand star is HD109285 and is class G5 (so in the middle of the G class  , like the sun). The two stars are a similar vanilla colour.

Bill

Well it was a bit of a bright moon the other night and I had decided to do a bit more LRGB observing using Jocular. No sign of any brightish planetary nebulae but a couple of globulars looked worth a glance.

Messier 3 has been well described by MikeJW in the post before this one. Here's what a bit of colour gave.

I then had a look at the nearby M53.  This one is a bit further away than M3 at around 60,000 light years in Coma Berenices. M3 is Shapley-Sawyer class VI (intermediate mild concentration) whereas this one is said to be a slightly tighter class V (intermediate concentrations).

So after these too I had a look at NGC 5466. This is in Bootes and is about 52,000 ly away. It's a much looser class XII (almost no concentration towards the centre).

It has been found to be the source of an extensive tidal tail stretching more than 40 degrees. This has been pulled out by its passage closer to the centre of the galaxy (perigalacticon - I did not know there was such a word!) and has been extensively studied.

e.g. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.5771.pdf

Globular clusters - always worth a look!

Bill S

Hello Martin

Yes, they are all very well worth a look. I'm going to have to do a bit more Jocular LRGB on some of the brighter galaxies. So much to see!

NGC 4526 has been given the strange nickname ‘The Hairy Eyebrow Galaxy’. At least it has by Stephen James O’Meara in his book Hidden Treasures. He lists it as object number 65 in this book. The galaxy is about 40 to 55 million light years away and is classified as a lenticular SAB type.

What I really liked was the two approximately magnitude 6.8 stars flanking it in an equidistant arrangement. Definitely one for the diffraction spike enthusiasts.

The galaxy in Virgo was discovered about this time of year (13 April) in 1784 by William Herschel.

Ramping up the stretch shows some fainter objects, in particular two quasars with magnitudes 19.7 and 20.3 marked in the snapshot below.

Always plenty to see in the part of the sky at this time of year.

Regards

Bill

Remarkable! Thank you for posting.

Just a suggestion. Something like Cosmos 2227 rocket. Mag 2.2. But that's from Lincolnshire not Spain. May be worth looking on Heavens Above.

Or Starlink...

Cheers

Bill

https://heavens-above.com/passdetails.aspx?&satid=22285&mjd=59322.904717832

I have been looking at one or two supernovae recently.

SN 2021fxy is in NGC 5018 and was reasonably easy to spot at a magnitude of about 14.

The supernova is marked in this selection.

SN 2021hiz is in IC 3322A (also called UGC 7513). It's a type 1a supernova of mag 13ish.

I am much less confident I have caught SN 2021J in NGC 4414. It was about magnitude 14 in mid-March and it may well have faded.

Anyway it's snapshot of the galaxy at the very least.

Nice to have some clear nights! They've gone now.

Cheers

Bill

Last year I posted an observation of NGC 4550. This is unusual and surprised me that it is rotating in two different directions.

I have been looking for other examples of this sort of thing.

NGC 4365 is an elliptical galaxy (E3) in Virgo. It's believed to be the result of a merger because it has a distinctly counter rotating core. It is very old, 12 billion years or so. Counter rotating disks are an active area of study and they can result from the merger mechanism (NGC  4365) or accretion (NGC 4550 above). See for example:

https://astrobites.org/2018/09/26/going-against-the-galactic-flow/

Here's my snapshot of it.

The smaller galaxy to the upper left is NGC 4370 and I think it looks a bit like a hamburger thanks to its noticeable dust lane. This galaxy has also been the subject of study as an example of of an Early Type Galaxy.  Early type galaxies is a bit of a misleading term because it relates to the original Hubble Tuning Fork diagram and the idea that distinctly spiral galaxies evolved from ellipticals. Just about the opposite of what we now believe. On the other hand ETGs may well be rather old so are early in that sense.

See for example:

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2015/07/aa26147-15.pdf

Looking at my observation there are some other objects in the field. I was pleased to capture a mag 19 quasar:

I think that's about enough of this one.

Cheers

Arp 220 The Nearest ULIRG

I watched an interesting talk by Prof. Dimitra Rigopoulou on the BAA YouTube channel about Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs). These are amazing bright objects but only known in any detail thanks to the availability of infrared telescopes. See:

The nearest of these is Arp 220 so I thought I'll have a look at that. It's not the most photogenic DSO but knowing about the object when you look at it adds to its beauty. It's 250 million light years away. Not 250,000 as shown on the Powerpoint slide above.

This isn't the first Jocular observation of this remarkable object. I looked about a year ago too.

The object is also IC 4553 and VV 540.

Cheers.

Very interesting observations. The background reading was fascinating. The 1899 paper is not a good advert for astronomy holidays in Uppsala (or Upsala).
 

Bill

Re. Double Spikes

I came across this.

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/513973-double-diffraction-spikes-normal-out-of-focus/
 

The later posts about double spikes when in focus may be of interest.

Bill

Good one, Mike.

Well done!

Will be good fun chasing some of these down and reading up about them. Thanks for the information and the links to the background reading.

I've been doing a bit of asteroid spotting prompted by the close approach of Vesta. My first shot is from 25 February so there was a bright Moon around. Rather pointlessly I put it through astrometry.net and then ASTAP to annotate it. My reason was that I wanted to try the asteroid annotation feature in ASTAP.

Vesta is the second largest asteroid (although the biggest, Ceres, is classed as dwarf planet). Vesta is said to have about 9% of the total mass of the asteroid belt and is about 525 km across.

Well that worked OK so I had a look at some others. Several were so close to the Moon that I got a lot of gradient in the captures but astrometry.net coped well.

Siri would be only about magnitude 11 because it's about 40 km across.

Almalthea is a bit bigger at 50 km and would be about magnitude 11 too. It was found to have a 5 km satellite in 2017. It's described as a Florian asteroid. These are similar stony asteroids in the inner asteroid belt named after the asteroid Flora.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flora_family

Frigga's snapshot was less affected by the Moonlight. It's about 69 km and is classed as an M-type. M-type means that it is largely metallic (real metals not astrophysicist's anything except hydrogen and helium metals). Lots of nickel-iron and M-types are likely to a source of metallic meteorites.

Amphitrite is a bigger asteroid at about 200 km and quite bright at magnitude about 9.3. It's an S-type so mainly rocky siliceous material.

Returning to Vesta a few days ago I decided to see if I could show it moving against the background stars. Some captures about 10 minutes apart over about 70 minutes were put together and made into a gif using the feature in Jocular.

Happy viewing.

Bill S

Excellent detail.

Martin - what a fine set of observations. I’ll be adding some of these to my lists for future observations and background reading. 
 

Some clear skies would help...

Hello Martin

A great couple of snapshots there. Beautiful and interesting objects. The central stars are fascinating. I had not heard about pulsating white dwarf stars before. More to follow up.

Good to hear your standard approach for getting reasonable observations for many PNs.

Bill

I could not resist having a look at my colour (LRGB) Jocular snapshot of NGC 2392. Tried out the various stretch options. With faint distant galaxies I usually settle on hyper but this object is a lot brighter (only 5 second subs). Anyway, I settled on either gamma or log. Log is the one below. Brings out a bit of detail. Mike JW's in mono with the bigger scope and more pixels shows more though. Always good to see different shots and compare.

Martin - I'll put it on the list for a return visit to look for the fainter objects you mention.

Bill

This observation started off being about Hickson 56. Hickson 56 is in Ursa Major and I was looking at objects in this part of the sky because it was away from a nearly full moon high in the sky.

The components of the group are identified in this shot. The group minus a is also Arp 322. It’s also VV 150.

I noticed another interesting larger object – NGC 3718. I could see a lot more detail because of its size. This is about 52 Mly away and has a bit of an S shape. It’s a barred spiral galaxy but because of its slightly strange shape it was added to Arp’s list as Arp 214.

Reading up about NGC 3718 there was mention that its shape may be because of an earlier interaction with NGC 3729. I looked through some of my earlier shots and found one showing Hickson 56/Arp 322 + NGC 3718/Arp 214 + NGC 3729. NGC 3729 is about 65 Mly away. It’s another barred spiral.

Sorry about the light pollution / gradients. Good job this is EEVA and not astrophotography.

Best regards

Bill

A few days ago had a look at VV 85 in Perseus.

A closer in view makes it a little easier to see the components.

The main component is NGC 1129. I found the labelled picture below which labels this galaxy and surrounding ones, including NGC 1130.

Surprisingly a paper by Vorontsov-Velyaminov et al (or more accurately completed in his memory, I suspect, since it was published 6 years after his death) seems to list VV 85 as consisting of NGC 1129 and 1130 as a pair. 

See: http://images.astronet.ru/pubd/2008/09/28/0001230678/717-959.pdf

Other references do not seem to include  NGC 1130.

The picture reproduced by Alvin Huey in his VV Catalog Part 1 describes VV 85 as consisting of four components close to NGC 1129 but not the more separated NGC 1130. Two components (a and b) are galaxies, with a being MCG+7-7-4, NGC 1129, UGC 2373 and b being MCG+7-7-3 . c and d are stars.

VV 85 is about 239 Mly away.

As so often I've spent more time looking up information and thinking about an object I've observed than I spent observing it.

Cheers

Bill

Just to add to the opportunities for confusion and missing things I notice that the abbreviation ShCG has  also been used for Shakhbazian compact galaxy group.

for example:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/307726/fulltext/39976.text.html

Alvin Huey's guide to some of these groups is interesting. It may have been mentioned in this thread already. I could not find it so here's the link:

http://faintfuzzies.com/Files/ShkGroups v1.pdf

Bill

A bit late to the party again.

This is a shot from late October 2020.

It's pretty sensitive to the type and amount of stretch as shown in the two images with hyper stretch and asinh stretch.

So I suppose we need to be careful when making comparisons.

I thought NGC 925 rang a bell. I looked at this back in September and was pleased to find this other Triangulum galaxy. I see from Wikipedia and one other source that it is called the Amatha Galaxy. I have not found out where this name comes from.

Any ideas? 

I also did a quick plate-solve + annotate to see what faint galaxies are in the field.

NGC 925 is a member of the NGC 1023 group of galaxies. The group is part of the Virgo Supercluster, which is then part of the Laniakea Supercluster and so it goes on...

Bill