Ngc 1532

[rat156]

Hi All,

This one took a very long time...

Taken with my 10" RCX400GPS at f/6 (AP0.75FR), SBig ST-10XME, CFW, AO-8, over several nights in December2008 and January 2009.

9.5 hours of luminance and 1.5 hours of each colour, 14 hours total.

http://tinyurl.com/6sssyl for larger version.

Hope you like it.

Cheers
Stuart

[renormalised]

Nice shot:)

[bluescope]

I like the long whispey spiral arm to the back of the galaxy .... well captured !

:thumbsup:

[Garyh]

Nice and smooth Stuart!
Big version is very nice :thumbsup:

[atalas]

Great shot Stuart ! well worth the work load.

[Lester]

Thats the rewards you get for such long capture time, excellent image.

[Bassnut]

Excellent Stuart, smooth but detailed, tricky object. The A08 seemed to work well, how long were the subs?

[rat156]

15 minutes for the Luminance, sometimes 10, depended on weather.

5 minutes binned for the colour.

Thanks for all the positive feedback guys.

Cheers
Stuart

[strongmanmike]

Yes, nice job Stuart, enjoyed your version of this galaxy very much.

It's an amazing looking galaxy, reminds me of a grasshoppers hind leg..?

Mike

[Ric]

Great image Stuart, definitely a very unusual looking galaxy.

[Kevnool]

Beautifull effort and galaxy.
For the time put in you were well rewarded.
Cheers Kev.

[PeterM]

Wow Stuart, you have done a great job on an old visual favourite. I remember it being nicknamed the Woomera galaxy in Gregg Thompson's Supernova charts and you can certainly see why.
PeterM.

[rat156]

Maybe a Locust Mike? Apparently there's plenty around...

Cheers
Stuart

[Paddy]

Nice shot Stuart - I tend to visit this galactic collision often so its nice to see such a lovely image. Love the colour of the core!

[Enchilada]

Really terrific image.

I did a general inspection of this and Megastar 5.0 on my MAC, and found some interesting comparisons. It is good to identify some of the fainter stuff in this image. Interestingly is the bottom the little spiral arm in the image has two little condensations instead of one.

It is also interesting to read about this system in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database, http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/forms/byname.html especially what is written in the Notes section , which appears also in the Alan Sandage and John Bedke's "The Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies. Vol 1.

"The unusual plumes in NGC 1532 suggest a tidal distortion due to an encounter. The evident candidate responsible for the perturbation is the amorphous companion NGC 1531, whose morphology is of the same class as M82. The two galaxies form a physical pair; the redshifts are v_o(1531) = 1053 km/s and v_o(1532) = 1105 km/s.
Three dwarf candidate companions form a wider physical group centered on the bright pair. The most interesting of the companions is at RA (1950) 4h 10m 56s, Dec (1950) = -33 deg 07' 36". It appears as a dwarf S0(8),N on a yellow plate but as an Im with condensations on a blue plate, similar to the transitional (Im-dE,N) case of NGC 4286 (panel 20) (Sandage and Hoffman 1991). The low ratio of the hydrogen mass to total mass also suggests that the dwarf is in transition between Im and dE,N dwarf types (Sandage and Fomalont 1993).
The other two dwarf candidate companions are a high-surface-brightness SB0 (M = -19) at RA (1950) 4h 10m 39s, Dec (1950) = -32 deg 56' 33", and a prototype faint dE0,N nucleated dwarf elliptical at RA (1950) = 4h 09m^ 32s, Dec (1950) = -32 deg 59' 09"."

They say of the bright companion;

"NGC 1531, here, is a close companion of NGC 1532 (Sbc; panel 197); the pair is presently in a close encounter. The enlargement of this print is great enough to exclude any part of NGC 1532 (panel 197) which is at an angular separation greater than 1.8'. A description of the pair and the
peculiar morphology of NGC 1532 is on panel 197.
NGC 1531 has an amorphous texture to its luminosity distribution; there is evidence of dust in the image."

Much of what you have captured here appears in these descriptions.

I was also wondering if you have cropped this image in any way, as there are galaxies to the eat - especially the other companion IC 2041, which is just above the top portion of the image.

Thank you for sharing this image with us.

Note: I've attached the 32 arcmin field from Megastar 5.0.

[marc4darkskies]

Very nice job Stuart - smooth yet detailed. Did you do any sharpening on the disk? Doing smaller objects like this well is not easy - well done! :thumbsup:

Cheers, Marcus

[rat156]

Thanks for the nice comments. I was using a star in this vicinity as a guide star, so couldn't get that region in. There's a lot more in the background, but light pollution makes this difficult to bring out.



A little bit of sharpening on the centre of the galaxy. I though it was quite a large galaxy actually...

Cheers
Stuart