ASTRO: IC 334

IC 334 is a very disturbed galaxy in northwestern Camelopardalis near
its borders with Cepheus and Cassiopeia. Redshift puts it about 113
million light-years distant while a single Tully-Fisher measurement is
pretty much in agreement saying 122 million light-years. NED shows its
classification as simply S? It appears likely it is the result of a
merger that happened some time ago. Long enough in the past that most
of its blue stars have long since died off. Though it did host
supernova SN 2008hy in its northern tidal plume. I was surprised to
find very little on this interesting looking galaxy. This far north,
galaxy data is very thin. NED had nothing but the coordinates of a
handful of 2MASS galaxies with no magnitude or redshift data. Due to
the lack of data I didn't prepare an annotated version.

There is a lot of faint nebulosity around the field. The band going
south from IC 334 is rather obvious. Yet I couldn't find anything on
it. I assume it is IFN (Interstellar Flux Nebula) that is rather common
near the pole.

As is common with 2012 images, weather did a number on me. A lot of
frames were worthless. Out of some 30 frames taken I used only 4 of the
"best" luminance frames. Color was even worse. Only one green frame
was usable. Blue were all poor so I chose the best three and hoped for
the best. I did find 2 rather good red frames. So the color balance of
this one may be skewed to the red, especially in fainter areas.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' R=2x10' G=1x10' B=3x10', STL-11000XM,
Paramount ME

Rick
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