by Jane Houston Jones
NGC 2608 is one of Halton Arp's remarkable galaxies. It is known as Arp 12 in Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. It is a small faint barred spiral galaxy elongated 1.5 x 1' ENE-WSW with brightening at the center and a stellar nucleus. The little galaxy glows at visual magnitude 12.3 with a surface brightness of 13.6. Surface brightness is derived by dividing the objects magnitude by its area. The surface brightness number gives a better indication of its visibility than magnitude alone. This is a small faint galaxy but remarkable in many ways.
Located at R.A. = 08h 35m 18.86s Decl. = +28 degrees 28' 05.8" (2000), it is a quick starhop from the beautiful deep gold and blue double star, Iota Cancri.
I started my observing night Monday 5/21/01 by watching the sun set, and the sky darken. We had printed out the AAVSO Supernova Search Chart for NGC 2608, and our first target was Supernova 0829+28 SN2001bg, discovered less than two weeks earlier during a U.K. Nova/Supernova Patrol. The supernova's reported magnitude of 13.9 is well within the abilities of our two large 14.5 and 17.5 inch reflector telescopes, and the hunt was on. We observed sinking planets, brighter objects and pretty double stars on our lists until about 10:00 p.m. when it was dark enough for our project. I did a limiting magnitude star count in Leo and came up with 6.4 LM, which is about average for all the nights I've observed at Lake Sonoma, in Northern California.
The galaxy was soon in the eyepieces of our 14.5 inch and 17.5 inch truss tube reflectors - made by LITEBOX telescopes of Hawaii. The supernova was easy to see in both telescopes. NGC 2608 was sharply "S" shaped, nearly "Z" shaped, with the bar much brighter than the wispy arms. In fact the arms were barely visible in the 9mm Nagler at 222x of my 17.5 incher. I had to pump it up to 333 power with a Orion Lanthanum 6mm eyepiece to really get detail. The galaxy has a very bright core, and a star superimposed in the bar, and the stellar nucleus may actually be another star, according to Uranometria Deep Sky Field Guide. Near the edge of the galaxy shone the supernova, 22" east and 19" south of the center of NGC 2608. Luckily it is away from the bar itself so as not to be confused with the star or nucleus embedded therein.
We mused that if there were extra-solar planets nearby that distant star, that the explosion would have wiped them out and everything on or in it. Funny the things you think about while observing. Life and death and things like that. I sketched the galaxy and the supernova, drew in all the surrounding stars so that I could verify (to myself) the magnitude by comparing it to the surrounding stars at home using SkyMap Pro, Version 7. The AAVSO maps we brought with us gave some star magnitudes, and I noted that the star GSC1948-1486 shone at a magnitude 12.8 with a mag 13.3 mag star nearby. The supernova was brighter than the 13.3 star but not as bright as the 12.8 star in my opinion.
Now that was a very satisfying observing project to kick off another great night of observing. Some research beforehand, easy starhopping to the galaxy, finding the supernova, then sketching it and observing it and comparing its magnitude to nearby stars. I'll bet I took at least an hour on the project.
Perhaps the other most remarkable object we studied that night was one we did not see. We were locating and observing the many galaxies in Ursa Major, using the Night Sky Observers Guide, and the Millennium Star Atlas. Right there on page 558 of the Millennium Star Atlas, near yet another NGC galaxy was a small symbol - smaller than that of any of the plotted galaxies, and on a section of the map where few galaxies were plotted. The caption below the small symbol read "Hubble Deep Field."
Jane Houston Jones observing from Lake Sonoma, California
Lat/Long: 38 42' 54.7" 123 02' 43.7"