ASTRO: UGC 240

UGC 00240 is a spiral with a long tidal tail. Unfortunately it was
taken the night I left the light on in the observatory. One hit the
corrector plate creating a huge flood of dust specks not able to be
corrected with the flat as the illumination angle was wrong. WHile I
was able to survive this with vdB 144 using the following nights color
frames, this one was taken all one night so the color frames were as
badly hit as the luminance frames. I've lost several magnitudes and the
dust mots are still quite evident. It's on the reshoot list but for now
I'm processing this version as it is a quite interesting system. Seeing
was poor as well so it gets a double whammy.

UGC 00240 is listed as SAB(rs)b at NED. I'd have expected a pec tag but
apparently not. While redshift puts it at 380 million light-years
Tully-Fisher knocks of 100,000 saying 280 million light-years give or
take a few depending on how it is interpreted. Assuming the larger
distance its diameter is about 100,000 light-years or 220,000 with the
plume. The apparent cause of the plume is the galaxy to the east
northeast which NED calls UGC 00240 NOTES 1. It does have some tidal
distortion in the SDSS image.

The galaxy at the very top of the field is UGC 00237 also at 380 million
light-years by redshift. It too would be about 100,000 light-years
across at that distance but is very red and dead as far as star
formation goes.

Most of the rest of the field is very poorly studied. Even when NED had
some data on a galaxy it was sometimes wrong. For instance 2MASX
J00260803+0632043 at the far left is listed at magnitude 2.6! A very
obvious mistake. I started annotating question marks for galaxies not
in NED then quickly realized nearly all in the image weren't in NED so
quickly stopped doing so. All that are in NED are noted by name in the
annotated image along with 4 asteroids. Their data is in the annotated
image. I could find several more in the FITS but once I removed the
worst of the problems caused by leaving the lights on they vanished.
All would have been easy if not for my mistake.

I've also attached the image of UGC 240 by the Sloan survey.

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

Rick
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