ASTRO: NGC 2787

NGC 2787 is a barred spiral in Ursa Major. Red shift puts it about 36
million light-years away though this has a large error bar. NED lists
two other distance measurements of 42 million light-years by Tully
measurement and 24 million light-years by resolution of Surface
Brightness Fluctuations. The HST has taken a great image of the core of
this galaxy and uses the 24 million light-year distance. I don't know
if this is yet another measurement or they are using the SBF measurement.

The NGC Project classes it as SB(0) while NED says SB(r)0+ LINER. So it
has an active core. The HST image shows a lot of fine dust rings around
the south side of the core. I didn't resolve the dust rings but do see
a hint of their color along the south side of the core. I have no idea
if this is due to those bands or just coincidental noise due to my short
integration time. The location is correct at least. I see only a hint
of the bar other than the bright regions where it joins the ring
structure. It's red color indicates star formation has been very low
for a very long time so all the blue stars have long since burned out or
are hidden behind thick dust.

For more on this one see the HST image and info at:
http://heritage.stsci.edu/2002/07/index.html . The HST image covers a
square of 37 pixels around the core in my image.

The galaxy to the upper left is UGC 04944. NED has no redshift distance
for it so I don't know if it is related to NGC 2787 but rather doubt it
is. It is a Scd: spiral seen nearly edge on.

The entire image is bathed in faint galactic cirrus which came as a
surprise to me when processing the image. After seeing it on the first
night's images I went back the second night to help bring it out.
Unfortunately, air glow was much higher so it was not nearly as strong
but seeing was better. I combined all 8 frames which helped resolution
but hurt the cirrus. I need to retry this on a good night with low air
glow. Rarely happens here of late however.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=8x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick

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Did it again. Grabbed the poorly aligned images. These are the right ones.

Rick


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Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net