Hey Rick,

Found an HST pic of it for you. I'm not sure it's any easier to pick out
the spiral structure or not but there it is. Neat galaxy.

Rick Johnson wrote:
I'm returning to Arp galaxies with Arp 24, NGC 3445 in Ursa Major.
Looking at my image you might think it belongs under the class of spiral
with bright companions on arms but that would be wrong. It's classed
under one armed spirals. The galaxy that appears to be on the end of
that arm, PGC 32784, isn't mentioned by Arp. Red shift shows NGC 3445
to be 103 light years away while the apparent companion, PGC 32784, has
a red shift distance of 88 million light years. Most sources however
consider these an interacting pair even with the different red shift
distances. The difference can be due to gravitational interaction and
not a real relative distance indicator. There are two other galaxies in
the image that are quite likely associated with Arp 24. They are NGC
2440 to the upper right at about 100 million light years and NGC 3458 to
the upper left at a red shift distance of 91 million light years.

The spiral structure of Arp 24 isn't all that well defined with the one
arm being very broad and ill defined. It is full of star clusters and
likely emission nebula if my resolution were higher.



14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME
Image scale 1" per pixel



--
Adriano
34°14'11.7"N

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