The main interest of today's APOD is that it underscores what a dedicated amateur armed with a small telescope and endless amounts of patience can achieve today when it comes to photographing faint 13th magnitude objects at a distance of 300 million light-years. It is impressive, to say the least.
Bruce Waddington's picture reminds me of the portrait of this pair in James D Wray's 1988 book,
The Color Atlas of Galaxies. Wray photographed "The Mice" (NGC 4676) in 1979 with a 2.7 meter telescope, but in spite of the big telescope that he had access to, he captured fewer details of the mighty cosmic mice than Waddington did (last year?) with a telescope likely a fraction of that size.
I want to quote what Wray wrote about NGC 4676a, the galaxy with the long straight tail:
The morphological nature of the inner region of NGC 4676a is nothing less than baffling.
Good point. But
Hubble has shown us that the "inner darkness" of NGC 4676a, where its bright core ought to be, is due to the fact that a thick dust lane is located in front of the core from our point of view, hiding the core from us.
Note, by the way, that NGC 4676b appears to have a twisted inner dust lane, somewhat reminiscent of the weird inner dust lane in
M96.
Ann
The main interest of today's APOD is that it underscores what a dedicated amateur armed with a small telescope and endless amounts of patience can achieve today when it comes to photographing faint 13th magnitude objects at a distance of 300 million light-years. It is impressive, to say the least.
Bruce Waddington's picture reminds me of the portrait of this pair in James D Wray's 1988 book, [i]The Color Atlas of Galaxies[/i]. Wray photographed "The Mice" (NGC 4676) in 1979 with a 2.7 meter telescope, but in spite of the big telescope that he had access to, he captured fewer details of the mighty cosmic mice than Waddington did (last year?) with a telescope likely a fraction of that size.
I want to quote what Wray wrote about NGC 4676a, the galaxy with the long straight tail:
[quote]The morphological nature of the inner region of NGC 4676a is nothing less than baffling.[/quote]
Good point. But [url=http://hubblesite.org/image/1183/news_release/2002-11]Hubble[/url] has shown us that the "inner darkness" of NGC 4676a, where its bright core ought to be, is due to the fact that a thick dust lane is located in front of the core from our point of view, hiding the core from us.
Note, by the way, that NGC 4676b appears to have a twisted inner dust lane, somewhat reminiscent of the weird inner dust lane in [url=https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap190612.html]M96[/url].
Ann