NGC 0266 A nice mistake

Beautiful image Rick.
Probably one of the nicest autumn galaxies. It couldn't hold on to that
status in spring though :-)

Stefan

"Rick Johnson" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...

NGC 266 is a classic barred spiral in northern Pisces right on the
border with Andromeda. In fact the western edge of the galaxy lies in
Andromeda. It is some 200 million light-years distant and classed as
SB(rs)ab. In fact it is often the text book example of that
classification. It is a huge galaxy. Assuming the 200 million
light-year distance it is some 180,000 light-years across.

While NGC 266 was discovered by William Herschel September 12, 1784 it
isn't in either of the Herschel 400 observing programs by the
Astronomical League. As a fairly normal barred spiral galaxy, why did I
image it? I normally don't go for the ordinary objects. Looking around
the net I found a fair number of folks have imaged it. The answer is
that it was an accident. My to-do list does list NGC 0266 but then goes
on to describe it as "NGC 0266 is a pair of interacting galaxies. Tail
is long and straight -- faint" I go on to say it may be too far south
then list the declination for the real NGC 0266 at 32 degrees north.
Obviously I made a mistake somewhere. I have no idea what interacting
galaxy pair I meant. So instead I ended up with a rather photogenic
galaxy image. If anyone figures out what galaxy's designation I
scrambled please let me know so I can try again.

While I seem to have imaged the wrong galaxy it is interesting. The arm
coming from the west side that loops over the one from the east side
ends suddenly as if it and the disk between it and the other arm were
bitten off by some huge galaxy eater (Super Godzilla?) leaving a bit of
debris behind. Otherwise the galaxy seems very normal.

It is located in an area little studied for distant galaxies. Only one
other galaxy had a distance measurement in NED. That is the elliptical
like galaxy with a huge faint halo south of NGC 266 at a distance of
some 870 million light-years. A third object is listed in NED with a
distance of 230 million light-years. It is a radio source not listed as
a galaxy. It's position has a radius error bar of 45 arc seconds which
is huge. The center of the error circle lies on a faint, highly
distorted galaxy at the bottom of my image. I've indicated it with a
question mark beside the name as it might or might not be referring to
the galaxy in my image.

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

Rick
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