by Steve Gottlieb
Instead of raving about views of Comet C/2001 Q4 (NEAT), here are a couple of galaxies that caught my interest:
I've been working on tracking down HII regions in galaxies (June '04 S&T has a nice article ;-) and spent some time on NGC 4449 and NGC 4605 --
| NGC 4449 |
|---|
| 18" f/4.3 Starmaster: fascinating view of this "Magellanic" system
at 323x! The galaxy is very irregular in appearance and surface brightness
with a large, bright, elongated core oriented SW-NE. The core appears offset
to the south side of the galaxy.
Several knots (giant HII regions) are visible outside the core. The brightest is a well-defined obvious patch on the north edge of the galaxy, 1.5' from the center. This object is #15 in Hodge-Kennicutt's 1983 "Atlas of HII regions in 125 galaxies" and it is nearly comparable in surface brightness to the core. Roughly 1' SE is a smaller, faint knot which is collinear with [HK83] 15 and a mag 13.5 star 2.4' east of the core. A third difficult knot can be sometimes glimpsed about 40" SW of [HK83] 15. Finally, attached on the south end of the core there is a larger, bright knot, although initially I though this was just part of the core. |
| NGC 4605 |
| 18" (5/8/04): at 225x, appears very bright, large, quite elongated 5:2 ~NW-SE. Contains a relatively large, high surface brightness elongated core. This galaxy's structure is very unusual with careful viewing. The SE extension is clearly brighter and is more tapered than the NW end. Also the SE extension has a mottled or splotchy appearance apparently from brighter and darker regions or possibly from knotty HII regions. Near the center there is a slight bend of kink to the major axis and with the fainter NW extension slightly misaligned. Also the NW extension appears to fan out somewhat at the NW edge and fade into the background. |
Posted on sf-bay-tac May 12, 2004 18:47:04 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.1 Jul 11, 2004 19:00:02 PT