ASTRO: The nearly invisible galaxy PGC 016957

UGCA 105/PGC 016957 is a galaxy in the Maffei 1 group. It is located in
Camelopardalis. The Maffei 1 group is thought to be about 10 million
light-years away. Several distance measurements for UGCA 105 put it
about 11 million light-years away. NED classifies it as Im while other
sources say Sm. My image appears to support the Sm classification. The
field was very difficult to process because of the 6th magnitude star,
SAO 13413 to the northwest and 8th magnitude SAO 13423 just to the
southeast of the galaxy. These cast strong but uneven glaring artifacts
over the image. Also the field is full of faint nebulosity. Separating
glare from real signal was difficult. I likely left in some artifacts.
The galaxy is heavily obscured. I was surprised at the very blue
outlying regions. I'd expect them to be reddened by all the dust.
Could be they are mostly artifacts or reflection nebulae though they
appear to hint at a spiral pattern of outlying arms of the galaxy. The
core appears an off color for most galaxy core regions. Conditions were
rather good for this image so I'd expect the color to be reasonably correct.

I suspect this galaxy would be quite spectacular if we could actually
see it without our galaxy's dust obscuring the view.

Due to all the obscuring dust few other galaxies appear in the image.
Those that do have no significant data at NED so no annotated image was
made.

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

Rick
--
Prefix is correct. Domain is arvig dot net