ASTRO: NGC 3299, NGC 3306 and CGCG 065-069

NGC 3299 and 3306 are a pair of unrelated galaxies in Leo just west of
the M95-96-105 group. Being unrelated I'll cover them separately. NGC
3299 is a low surface brightness galaxy with little detail seen even
though it is face on to us. While its distance by redshift is 46
million light-years that is likely too far. Tully Fisher measurements
put it only 18 million light-years away. If the latter it is only
12,600 light-years across though it is 32,300 light-years across if the
larger distance is accepted. Quite a disparity. It is classed as
SAB(s)dm at NED and S(B)dm at the NGC Project, which makes it a barred
spiral though the bar is extremely difficult to see. It was discovered
by William Herschel in 1784 using his 18.7" reflector. Since I've seen
reports of it requiring averted vision to be seen in a 17.5" scope today
it must have been near Herschel's visual limit when discovered. Several
galaxies can be seen right through its thin disk. I've marked the one
that has redshift distance data. I'm a bit suspicious about the distant
galaxies entry in NED however. It's distance of 3.1 billion light-years
seems reasonable enough, what bothers me is NED classifying it. Since
it shows as only a couple pixels in size how they determine it to be an
Sdm galaxy I can't fathom. Of all the galaxies at this distance I've
seen in NED this is the first they listed with a classification.

NGC 3306 is sometimes called a companion of NGC 3299 but that is only a
line of sight illusion. It's distance by redshift is 150 million
light-years and grows to nearly 170 million light-years by Tully Fisher
measurements. A rather good agreement this time. It is classed as
SB(s)m? by NED and Sc? by the NGC Project. Even though much further
away it is easier to see visually by all reports though oddly both
William and John Herschel missed it when looking at the nearby but far
fainter NGC 3299. Its discovery had to wait for another 102 years,
until 1886 when Lewis Swift found it in a 16" refractor. I've seen it,
just barely, in my 10" f/5 scope but not NGC 3299 even though it is
listed as being a magnitude fainter than NGC 3299. It's light is spread
out over a much smaller area making it much easier to find.

There's a lot going on in the image as shown by the annotated image.
Between the two NGC galaxies is a pair of very blue galaxies. The
western one has a distance of 460 million light-years. No distance data
is available for the one abutting it to the east. Are they a colliding
pair. I see no plumes so they are likely further away than they appear
or this is their initial meeting so there hasn't been times for plumes
or distortion to set in.

Below NGC 3299 near the bottom of the image is ASK 430799 at 2.16
billion light-years. It does have some interesting plumes which make it
nearly 200,000 light-years across. Unfortunately I found nothing more
on it however. The ASK catalog was new to me and new to NED as they too
didn't list it as a catalog when I clicked on the link to tell me more
about the catalog it came back with it being a designation recognized by
NED. A bit more digging and I found it stands for "Automatic
Spectroscopic K-means-based classification" and NED now has over 700,000
entries from this catalog yet doesn't seem to know it as yet.

Several galaxy clusters are in the image. Only those with a defined Big
Cluster Galaxy are shown in the annotated image as the rest were too
uncertain for me to include. Seeing was poor for this one and got worse
during the imaging with the blue frames really tore up with 6" seeing
which makes separating galaxy from star difficult so I didn't attempt
it. If the distance estimate was done photographically I've indicated
that with a "p" after the distance. Usually the distance for the BCG
was slightly different and often did have spectroscopic redshift data
(no "p"). Likely this latter distance estimate is more accurate.

The distance to quasars is so confusing due to relativity issues that
besides a light travel time distance I've listed their redshift z value
showing how much their light is red shifted. A z of 1 means the
wavelength has doubled in value due to its expansion velocity. 2 means
it is tripled. So a spectral line in the near ultra violet is now in
the near infra red part of the spectrum for a z=2 quasar. We are seeing
its deep ultra violet light shifted into the visual spectrum. Even so a
quasar with a z=2.155987 appears very blue in the image indicating it is
very bright in the very deep part of the ultra violet spectrum. Now
that is hot!

There are three asteroids in the image. See the annotated image for
their details.

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

Rick

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