The night of 29 March, up on Ranger Row, I made a project of running
down 12 splashy galaxies situated in a fairly close radius around
Porrima. That was the night Jardine split Porrima after numerous bold
efforts. Also the night Joe Bob showed us where Vesta was naked-eye,
and Kingsley was showing us a supernova in 3169.
http://observers.org/tac.mailing.list/2003/Mar/0482.html was my first
report for that really fancy night. I'd promised to post notes about
some of the really beautiful galaxies in that set. Here goes -
4666 really made an impression, a gorgeous edge-on, core concentrated
and fairly bright at 126x. Like a junior version of 4565. Nice!
4697, tight swirl with big round bright core, dust lanes, looking
almost face-on, slightly elongated ca 70 deg (yes!).
Here I got excited because my estimation of this galaxy's PA was
right on the official money. I've been practicing measuring positions
for several reasons, a) keeps me looking and studying that galaxy,
b) good practice for keeping track of sky motion, c) Gottlieb does it.
4762, the flattest galaxy, according to Tom Polakis as I remember,
yes the very flattest edge-on visually, a sharp splinter with central
bulge. Right next it, 4754, round fairly uniform disk, slightly
elongated ca 30 deg.
4753, more eye candy. Compact fat swirly oval, almost stellar core,
slight elongation ca 135 deg. (Here I was way off on the PA, supposed
to be 80 deg. It's an irregular galaxy, so maybe I was noticing a
secondary hump.)
These are all within 12 degrees of Porrima, along with crowds of
other galaxies. 4536 and 4527 are also in that immediate area, the
jumping-off galaxies for 3c273, brightest of the quasars and fairly
easy in a lot of our scopes. Great part of the sky, where you hop
with galaxies rather than stars.
Cheers,
DDK
-- Jamie Dillon <*> <mavericks@No-Spam> check out TAC, The Astronomy Connection, http://observers.org - no rules, dues, officers, bylaws nor meetings, just observing!