ASTRO: CGCG 538-059 and WBL 071

This field is in Andromeda less than a degree southeast of the far more
famous NGC 891. CGCG 538-059/PGC 9101 is one Arp missed for his
category for spiral galaxies with a low surface brightness galaxy on an
arm. Like many Arp put in this category the companion has no red shift
data. In this case the field is very poorly cataloged so it isn't even
listed. While it appears likely it is a true companion I can't verify
it. It is a very blue galaxy that could indicate interaction. The main
galaxy has one cut off arm and one long one apparently drawn out by the
companion. I moved it to the upper right of the image to pick up as
much of the WBL 071 galaxy cluster as possible.

WBL 071 is a part of the much larger Abell 0347 galaxy cluster. The
center of the Abell cluster is a few minutes south of the bottom edge of
my image. It is listed as having a diameter of 863 minutes or 14.4
degrees! That can't be right. Abell lists no diameter in his catalog.
86.3 minutes would be reasonable but is it right? It is listed as
Richness Class 0 which is the smallest class in number of galaxies with
30 to 49 galaxies. WBL 071 is listed with 18 galaxies with no size. It
is centered a bit NE of NGC 906.

In the upper left corner is an odd grouping of galaxies. It appears to
be a cluster of apparently very distant galaxies around a large
elliptical. Oddly the entire group seems the same orange color as if
some paint brush was used to color that part of my image with the same
color. While 7 of the galaxies are in NED none have a redshift. Is the
color due to some dust cloud between the group and us or is the group
distant enough that this is due to general dust and gas extinction? All
of these that NED lists are from the 2MASS catalog so are dusty galaxies
emitting a lot of IR light. Wish I knew more about this group.

The annotated image lists what few galaxies for which NED had redshift
distance. Since room wasn't a problem I listed them by catalog name,
classification and distance in billions of light-years. Oddly this
turned up two apparent mistakes. CGCG 538-060 classed as E/U is an
obvious spiral rather than an elliptical. Anyone know what the /U
means. It's new to me nor did I turn up anything on it as a
classification. The other error involves CGCG 538-059 which was my main
target! NED classes it as SB, that is a barred spiral. I see no hint
of a bar and the arms deserve at least a "b" rating. That is what a
note at NED says. It classes it as Sb. Probably just a capitalization
error at NED.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=6x10' RGB=2x10'x3, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick
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