ASTRO: NGC 3344 Another rarely seen face on spiral galaxy

NGC 3344 is a much neglected nearby classic face on barred spiral in Leo
Minor. At a distance of only 25 million light-years according to the
HST website it is surprisingly poorly known. It was on my list as being
a Herschel 400 object. I've been slowly picking these up as time
permits. This one happens to be very photogenic but much overlooked.
The NGC Project classifies it as Sc ignoring the bar. NED gives the
more generally accepted classification of (R)SAB(r)bc. While redshift
puts it some 41 million light-years away other measurements put it much
closer. The HST, using both a type one supernova and some easily
resolved Cepheid variable stars puts it at a more reasonable 25 million
light-years which also matches the resolution the HST gives on the
galaxy. See: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1242a/ for the
full story and images.

While seeing was rather average, transparency was below average. I
should have used more than my good skies 4 luminance frames to pick out
the faint outer arms. I had to stretch further than I like to bring
them out raising the noise in the background more than I'd like. Longer
times or a better night would bring out a lot I missed.

The annotated image points out two star clusters NED had listed as blue
objects in the galaxy. The HST image doesn't extend out far enough to
pick them up unfortunately. The galaxy has a lot of very tiny HII
regions but my seeing wasn't good enough to pick them up.

The annotated image shows a large number of galaxies in the field to be
at a distance of 720 and 740 million light-years. I found one galaxy
group at NED that contained only 4 galaxies at the 720 million
light-year distance. Which four I don't know and why the rest are
ignored I don't know. There are several galaxy pairs in the image but
only one of the pair, if any, would have a redshift measurement so hard
to know if they are really close pairs or just line of sight galaxies.
Again I'm left with more questions than I started with.

The one asteroid in the image is also noted on the annotated image.

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

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

Rick,

this is one of my favourite object for early spring, but I don't remember
having seen it as impressive as in your image.
Really beautiful.

Stefan

"Rick Johnson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...

NGC 3344 is a much neglected nearby classic face on barred spiral in Leo
Minor. At a distance of only 25 million light-years according to the
HST website it is surprisingly poorly known. It was on my list as being
a Herschel 400 object. I've been slowly picking these up as time
permits. This one happens to be very photogenic but much overlooked.
The NGC Project classifies it as Sc ignoring the bar. NED gives the
more generally accepted classification of (R)SAB(r)bc. While redshift
puts it some 41 million light-years away other measurements put it much
closer. The HST, using both a type one supernova and some easily
resolved Cepheid variable stars puts it at a more reasonable 25 million
light-years which also matches the resolution the HST gives on the
galaxy. See: http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/potw1242a/ for the
full story and images.

While seeing was rather average, transparency was below average. I
should have used more than my good skies 4 luminance frames to pick out
the faint outer arms. I had to stretch further than I like to bring
them out raising the noise in the background more than I'd like. Longer
times or a better night would bring out a lot I missed.

The annotated image points out two star clusters NED had listed as blue
objects in the galaxy. The HST image doesn't extend out far enough to
pick them up unfortunately. The galaxy has a lot of very tiny HII
regions but my seeing wasn't good enough to pick them up.

The annotated image shows a large number of galaxies in the field to be
at a distance of 720 and 740 million light-years. I found one galaxy
group at NED that contained only 4 galaxies at the 720 million
light-year distance. Which four I don't know and why the rest are
ignored I don't know. There are several galaxy pairs in the image but
only one of the pair, if any, would have a redshift measurement so hard
to know if they are really close pairs or just line of sight galaxies.
Again I'm left with more questions than I started with.

The one asteroid in the image is also noted on the annotated image.

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

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