ASTRO: FGC 965 a neat flat galaxy

FGC 965 also known as NGC 3044 is a neat flat galaxy in Sextans some 75
million light-years distant by redshift. NED has 4 other estimates
ranging from 65 to 71 million light-years, rather good agreement for a
change. NED classes it as SB(s)c? while the NGC project is more certain
saying SBc. It made my list for two reasons. One is the odd plumes
that it has. The one north of the western arm is the stronger but
there's a similar but much fainter one north of the eastern arm. Both
are tilted about the same amount with respect to the galaxy's disk. The
other reason is that I'm imaging the "better" entries in the Flat Galaxy
Catalog. It certainly met that requirement even without the plumes.

Oddly none of the papers I read mention the plumes. They are all tied
up with H alpha emission bubbles and HI regions none of which seem to
correspond to the plumes. I was unable to learn a thing about them.
The galaxy is rather isolated with nothing in the area that could have
interacted with it other than some very small dwarf galaxies like the
one off its southeast end with a similar distance. They may be due to
it having digested one of these small galaxies in the recent past. Even
papers giving physical descriptions of the galaxy fail to mention these
odd features. They mention its lack of a core and central bulge, its
HII regions (too small for my resolution) and its dust lane as well as
its knotty appearance but none mention these tilted regions apparently
"above" the plane of the disk.

There is a lot of quasars and quasar candidates (UvES) in the image.
Usually these are all more distant than the galaxies in the image. But
in this image there is one galaxy listed at over 7 billion light-years
(has to be a monster of a galaxy) and quasars at one third that
distance. Adding to the confusion is one object, SDSS
J095350.35+012408.1, near the bottom center of the image. While some
sources list it as a quasar others, including NED list it as a Seyfert 1
galaxy. At a distance of 5.39 billion light-years it is in a range of
many galaxies in my image as well as quasars so that is of little help.
I've just listed it as Q/G rather than take sides. The most distant
galaxies are very faint, you likely will need to enlarge the annotated
image to see them. As usual all labels are to the right of the object
and list distance in billions of light-years using NED's 5 year WMAP
calculation.

There are quite a few galaxies in the 1.25-1.29 billion light-year
distance range. They are likely related. NED lists several galaxy
clusters at this distance in the image but none give a size and most
show no galaxy at their location making it hard to tell just what is in
the group. I didn't annotate them for this reason. One group near the
top of the image has a huge Big Cluster Galaxy at its center and is
listed with 16 members. Having an obvious core I did list it and
another entry that may be for the same cluster that has the same
redshift and nearly the same location. This latter cluster has no
galaxy count. Neither have a size. The latter is RXC J0953.6+0142
while the major one is SDSS-C4-DR3 1212/MaxBCG J148.42240+01.70065.

There are three rather faint asteroids in the image with short trails.
Short trails indicates they are nearing the end of their retrograde
motion and are about to reverse to their "normal" eastward motion in the
sky. They are identified on the annotated image.

Again, I found a galaxy on the western edge of the image not listed in
NED at all. Usually they are blue when this happens but not in this
case. I still don't understand why some are missed by NED when it picks
up many way too faint for my system.

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

Rick
--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net