Click on photos to enlarge.
“Horsehead, IC434 in Orion, is a dark nebula that we revisited; in 2007 we made
the earlier version. Now with more experience and additional processing programs
we could reveal much more detail. Layered Contrast Stretching from R.J. Gabany
in Sky&Tel of June 2011, among others, improved the contrast significantly.”
3190
The "Trio in
Leo" is quite spectacular; the group goes by another catalogued
name, "Hickson 44" (est. 60 million l-y away). Ngc 3187, an
edge-on barred spiral with warped outer arms; 3190 is a twin
with 3198, an edge-on, just underneath. The elliptical galaxy
3193 is devoid of detail; 3185, at the bottom, is a small
face-on galaxy.
3628-1
Ngc 3628 is
the northern one of the Leo Triplets (with M65 and 66), which
are gravitationally interacting; distance is 35 million l-y. The
edge-on galaxy is deformed by this interaction. X-ray
spectrography indicates a large central Black Hole.
3628-2 (adjacent to 1)
A very faint
“tidal tail” is drawn out to the left (about half a million l-y
long!). It took some very non-linear “stretchings” to bring the
tail out as shown, but at the cost of sharpness. The exposure
was one hour.
A__5907_Draco:
Ngc5907 in Draco, also named “Splinter” or “Knife Edge” galaxy,
is 40 million l-y away. It is of interest because it captured a
smaller galaxy 4 billion years ago. This resulted in a halo of
matter just detectable with an 11-hour exposure. We’ll try to
image this galaxy’s ring soon.
B__5907_Blackbird Observatory:
5907 as pictured with a 20” R-C by R.J. GaBany et al at
Blackbird Observatory in New Mexico, in an 11 hr exposure spread
over 4 nights in June and August of 2006. It required extreme
nonlinear “stretching”, but the halo did show (magnitude of the
halo is around 27). I experimented with that on Ngc3628’s tail.
C__5907_Beijing Obs:
Shang et al imaged the halo or ring also with the VLA and shown
here. VLA (NSF, US) is the Very Large Array of radio telescopes
(image rotated to align). The stars are depicted (blocked) as
black dots. The image obtained at radio frequencies adds to the
spectrographic data.
D__2841:
Galaxy Ngc2841 in Uma, also called “Tiger Eye” has a large
population of blue and thus young stars and stars still being
formed. Distance is 40 million l-y and size 150,000 l-y across,
a little larger than our MW.
E__ 2985:
A nice face-on galaxy in the Big Bear referred to in the
literature and on the web as “featureless”. OK, confirmed, but
still nice.
We tried to image 5907’s “ring” and just made it. The mass of
the “Splinter Galaxy” (5907) alone could not have caused the
ring shaped trail of the smaller captured galaxy. The large
spherical cloud of Dark Matter around 5907 is adding enough
gravitational pull to explain the “ring”.
The gravitational “lensing” of Abell 2218 is considered evidence
of a large cloud of CDM (cold
dark
matter) around
2218. This cluster of galaxies is 2 to 3 billion l-y away and
the “lensed” objects, galaxies, are even farther away and behind
it. We see (photograph) their distorted images as “Einstein
arches”.
The famous HST photo is inserted and aligned onto our cropped
image. These images are extremely dim and require hours of
exposure spread over several photo-sessions. We are sure now
that we have the right one. The reddish arch at 7 o’clock in
the HST inset is it and should be just bright
enough to show on our image.
Hurrah, it did show! After enlarging and enhancing our photo (in
B/W) is sensitive enough in the IR to show the Einstein arch in
the correct spot. The extreme “stretching”, enhancing, has its
price in introducing much noise. It is tough to compete with the
Hubble Space Telescope!
Milky Way galaxy has over a dozen of dwarf galaxies. The Draco-Dwarf is
near, 270,000 l-y (Andromeda galaxy is 2.2 million l-y away) and
interesting as it has a much larger halo of CDM, cold dark matter, than
the average galaxy of that size. Astro-Physics is paying a lot of
attention to CDM lately. Too bad that we cannot photograph Dark Matter
halos and Black Holes.
NGC6946 or Fireworks galaxy in Cepheus got its name from the SuperNovae
it featured.The latest one was SN 2008-S; other recent ones were in
2004, 2002, 1980, 1969 and 1968. Six SuperNovae in 40 years! That’s over
ten-fold of what can be expected for this size galaxy; 1 per century is
average. We went over this picture carefully, but this evening no SN.
SN2011fe is a Super Nova, detected in the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101,
on 08/23/2011 by the Berkeley Group and published on 8/25. I
have marked it. Its brightness that night we estimated at 10.5.
We hope to photograph it again in a week or so to determine the
increase in brightness and next month when it could be at its
maximum.
