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Old 25-05-2011, 04:09 PM
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madbadgalaxyman (Robert)
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Brisbane
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GalexView - powerful, but one nasty habit

As mentioned previously, the really beautiful all-sky Virtual Telescope interface that allows us to access Ultraviolet Images from the GALEX satellite, has the major drawback that it sometimes displays two different versions of the same field, depending upon which object you actually ask it to point at.

Here is an example of this problem (sorry, it's northern). This is the interesting and little studied NGC 198 & NGC 182 field in a distant supercluster of galaxies that is nominally 5 times as distant as the Virgo Cluster.

Depending upon whether I use NGC 198 or NGC 182 as the target object, I get either this:

Click image for larger version

Name:	___N0200 field__V1.jpg
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ID:	94637

, or this:

Click image for larger version

Name:	___N0200 field__V2.jpg
Views:	16
Size:	218.3 KB
ID:	94638


These three distant spiral galaxies are small, no more than
1 to 1.5 arcminutes across, so the cleaned version of this field makes all the difference. In particular, NGC 182 has a very fine example of a star-forming ring.

I have not yet found a way to get around the problem that sometimes very poor data is displayed even when better data is available!

cheers,
madbadgalaxyman
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