ASTRO: NGC 4298 and 4302

NGC 4298 and 4302 are a commonly imaged pair of galaxies in the Virgo
galaxy cluster about 60 million light-years away. Redshift puts them a
bit further than this. They share nearly the same redshift indicating
they could be quite close together. This however appears rather
unlikely as there's no real sign of interaction. If they were as close
as they appear to be from our perspective distortion of NGC 4302's edge
on disk should be obvious. It shows no sign of being warped. Both
galaxies do show a large faint outer halo than their obvious disks but
again, these would distort if they were really close and this isn't seen.

NGC 4298 is a somewhat face on flocculent galaxy. NED and the NGC
project class it as SA(rs)c. If the outer halo is included it is over
90,000 light-years in diameter. The bright blue disk itself is about
50,000 light years across.

NGC 4302 is seen virtually edge on and has a very dense dust lane that
completely hides the core. The bright part of the disk is nearly
100,000 light-years wide and 11,500 thick. If the outer halo is
included its dimensions are 150,000 by 30,000 light-years. While it
shows no sign of a central bulge the ratio of the outer halo is only
150:30 = ~5:1. The Flat Galaxy Catalog requires a ratio of 7:1 as seen
on the Palomar plates. Apparently they include this faint outer halo.
If only the bright disk was used it would qualify. Except for the ends
of the disk it mostly surprisingly red. This may be due to the dust
rather than old stars though it does show areas of blue, especially at
the southern end near a foreground star. The same paper cited in my NGC
5777 post shows a similar, very small plume in this galaxy. They
obviously got the directions wrong in their image and don't show the
entire galaxy. What they do show has stars and other features
subtracted out making it impossible for me to determine where they are
looking.

I get an odd illusion with this pair. I see NGC 4298 as a buzz saw and
NGC 4302 has having had the buzz saw cut off its northern arm as it
passed through the galaxy coming toward us and our galaxy. Pure
pareidolia as I doubt these to are interacting in any way.

The annotated image shows catalog names for objects with names that are
not just its coordinates. Many come from the Virgo Cluster catalog
(VCC) most of which aren't members of the cluster. VPC is the Virgo
Photometric Catalog and it too contains non cluster galaxies.

East of NGC 4302 is LEDA 169144 which is a really large spiral at
172,000 light-years in diameter if its redshift distance of 1.19 billion
light-years is correct.

As usual I ran into a rather bright fuzzy blue galaxy not in NED. Seems
there's at least one in most of my images. As usual it is noted by a
question mark.

The sky was far from transparent this night but otherwise didn't harm
the image. Due to lack of transparency its limiting magnitude is about
21 which is 1.5 below my norm under good skies.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=5x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick
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