With the Moon still mostly out of the way on February 23rd, I decided to go after Arp Galaxy 336, also known as the Helix Galaxy, and NGC 2685. I had attempted to get color data on it earlier, but the seeing was horrible, with high clouds moving in and out making the data next to useless.
This night started out far better with excellent seeing, and the tracking on my MyT mount performed the best it has so far. It may have helped that I turned down the setting on the dew heater. Although I imaged through the night, it turned out high clouds returned for the 2nd half, again making those subs unusable. But the first 19 ten minute subs binned 1x1 in luminosity were good. Here are three versions. The first is a full field and is annotated. The 2nd is just the field. And the third is a 800x600 crop showing the detail in the galaxy itself.
This is an example of a polar ring galaxy, a type that is fairly rare. It has a ring that is perpendicular to the disk of the galaxy. While rare, they do occur with some frequency (I've seen mentioned around 5%) with lenticular galaxies. There is lots of other unusual structure as well. The cause of these galaxies is not well understood.
This night started out far better with excellent seeing, and the tracking on my MyT mount performed the best it has so far. It may have helped that I turned down the setting on the dew heater. Although I imaged through the night, it turned out high clouds returned for the 2nd half, again making those subs unusable. But the first 19 ten minute subs binned 1x1 in luminosity were good. Here are three versions. The first is a full field and is annotated. The 2nd is just the field. And the third is a 800x600 crop showing the detail in the galaxy itself.
This is an example of a polar ring galaxy, a type that is fairly rare. It has a ring that is perpendicular to the disk of the galaxy. While rare, they do occur with some frequency (I've seen mentioned around 5%) with lenticular galaxies. There is lots of other unusual structure as well. The cause of these galaxies is not well understood.