IC 284 in dust

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IC 284 is a rather low surface brightness spiral in Perseus. Red shift puts it at 110 million light-years distant while Tully Fisher distances have two at 79 million light-years and one at 121 million light-years. Assuming the redshift distance it is a large spiral at 130,000 light-years across. It is classified as SAdm at NED and SAd? elsewhere. A Sd galaxy is often quite large due to the spread out arms so this may be reasonable. If the nearer Tully Fisher distance is used it is a more normal 93,000 light years across. The larger estimate makes it 143,000 light-years in diameter. Throw a three sided die and pick one. It was discovered by Lewis Swift on October 27, 1888. The apparent companion V Zw 319 is a red spherical compact galaxy surrounded by a circular halo with a bar according to the CGPG. Seligman says it is behind IC 284. I can't really tell which side it's on from my image. The eastern half is easily seen making it appear in front but there are other similar galaxies in my image at twice the distance of IC 284. It could be another from that group. In any case there's no sign of interaction so it could be much closer or further or nearly the same distance. Unfortunately there's no redshift data on it.

The other IC galaxy is IC 288 listed as S? by NED and Sab? by Seligman. It too was discovered by Lewis Swift but on October 31, 1888, 4 nights after he found IC 284.

The field around IC 288 has a large arc of nebulosity. At first I thought there was something wrong with the image. The flat had worked well with other images so was there some reflection causing this arc in the light frames? The Sloan image shows pieces of this nebulosity but not the entire arc I am seeing. Still I'm pretty confident it is all a real feature. I'll leave it to other imagers to take a deep image at a wider field and pick up this dust. I was unable to locate any nebula in the area in SIMBAD so it may be galactic cirrus (IFN). If so it is unusually bright.

Two faint asteroids made an appearance. The fainter one barely survived the JPG process but if you enlarge the image you should be able to just see it.

This area of the sky is poorly studied for galaxies. Only the 2MASS survey covers this are. Since it only picks up those seen at the two micron wavelength deep in the IR part of the spectrum many galaxies with little 2 micron emission aren't cataloged. Since so few were I broke my usual rule of not showing galaxies without red shift as well as my rule of not showing those only identified by their position in the sky. There were so few these didn't clutter up the image as normally would happen if I did this with a typical field of galaxies. Several I wanted to know more about didn't make the 2MASS so aren't cataloged. I marked those with a question mark though many other overlooked galaxies could also get that question mark label.

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

Rick