The curious case of M63

[Guest]

So is that bit of dusty stuff in Goranns first link ifn possibly or still part of the tidal stream somehow?  I'm talking about the stuff way out towards the edges of the field.

 

Oh missed Wims response.  So that is ifn then?  Then maybe some of the stuff I picked up in mine outside the ellipses could be just very faint ifn also.  

Edited February 17 by dciobota
Clarification

[Guest]

1 hour ago, ONIKKINEN said:

SFD dust map is quite weak around M63:

For comparison, here is the dust map around M81/M82 with much stronger signal:

I think there could be a tiny bit of IFN around M63, but unlikely to be shown in significant amount due to its weakness.

Thanks for those views.  Btw what software is that?  I've never seen one that shows the ifn so well.

[ONIKKINEN]

4 minutes ago, dciobota said:

Thanks for those views.  Btw what software is that?  I've never seen one that shows the ifn so well.

Legacy sky survey browser: https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer#m 63

Click the "more surveys" button and select the SFD dust map. There are loads of different surveys to pick from there as well.

[wimvb]

2 hours ago, ONIKKINEN said:

I think there could be a tiny bit of IFN around M63, but unlikely to be shown in significant amount due to its weakness

Ifn may be weak, but so is the tidal structure surrounding M 63.

[wimvb]

double post

Edited February 17 by wimvb

[ONIKKINEN]

16 minutes ago, wimvb said:

Ifn may be weak, but so is the tidal structure surrounding M 63.

Tricky target in that case, if both are of similar brightness so difficult to say where the M63 tidal parts end and the IFN begins.

[wimvb]

4 hours ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Tricky target in that case, if both are of similar brightness so difficult to say where the M63 tidal parts end and the IFN begins.

Indeed, and the authors of the paper that @dciobota links to discuss this.

"When first discovered by van der Kruit (1979), there was little doubt that this feature was real. However, it was unclear if it originated in M63 itself, or if it was instead a “high latitude reflection nebulosity in our Galaxy” (i.e., Galactic cirrus), analogous to that contaminating the field of M81 and M82 (Sollima et al. 2010)."

[Guest]

20 hours ago, ONIKKINEN said:

Legacy sky survey browser: https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer#m 63

Click the "more surveys" button and select the SFD dust map. There are loads of different surveys to pick from there as well.

Cool!  Thank you for that link, very useful.

[Guest]

14 hours ago, wimvb said:

Indeed, and the authors of the paper that @dciobota links to discuss this.

"When first discovered by van der Kruit (1979), there was little doubt that this feature was real. However, it was unclear if it originated in M63 itself, or if it was instead a “high latitude reflection nebulosity in our Galaxy” (i.e., Galactic cirrus), analogous to that contaminating the field of M81 and M82 (Sollima et al. 2010)."

I totally missed that part, I'm glad you pointed that out.  So it could well be a mix, and that makes a lot more sense to me now.