AVAO wrote: ↑Thu Apr 14, 2022 7:43 am
Congratulation. Very nice portrait picture of the galaxy, apart from the fact that the object is shown mirror-inverted.
Indeed, today's APOD is a very nice portrait of M96!
I have been having
a discussion with longtry over at the Asterisk Café about mid-distant galaxies, and during our discussion I suddenly remembered that fantastic edge-on background galaxy aligning itself with one of the arms of M96. Because of this, I decided to use today's APOD to talk a little about some of the background galaxies of M96.
APOD 14 April 2022 M96 Mark Hanson annotated.png
: What a looker! In
the ESO image at right, we can really appreciate how reddened the edge-on background galaxy truly is. The galaxy has a very large and extensive disk, hardly any bulge, and a thick mid-plane dust lane. Let's take another look at it:
Background galaxy of M96 ESO.png
Why is this galaxy so red? In view of the fact that it is much more reddened than almost all the other galaxies in the field, at the same time as it is the largest of the background galaxies, the reddening of the galaxy can't be caused by a great redshift and a huge distance. Instead, this galaxy is certainly self-reddened by its own thick dust lane, and it is also almost certainly reddened by dust in the arm of M96. After all, we see the background galaxy right through one of M96's arms.
As for galaxy #2, I am
almost positive that it is an elliptical background galaxy, although the ESO image makes it resemble a bright star. The galaxy looks impressive in Mark Hanson's and Mike Selby's APOD. An M96 dust lane cuts in front of it, which is strikingly visible in today's APOD, but barely visible in the ESO image. A small disk galaxy, possibly a barred galaxy, is located to the north of the large elliptical galaxy and is certainly interacting with it.
Galaxy #3 is not visible in the ESO image. It looks like an elliptical galaxy to me, but its core is a little bit whiter and less yellow in color than I would expect.
What kind of creature is galaxy #4? We see it right through the inter-arm region of M96. An enlargement of the ESO image reveals an almost certainly somewhat petite blue spiral galaxy with one prominent arm. Interestingly, there is another, rather similar galaxy on the other side of the inner ring of M96.
As for #5, the ESO image makes it look like one elliptical galaxy with one tiny, extremely distant galaxy(?) on one side of it and a red foreground star on the other side. I think it could also be two distant, redshift-reddened and possibly also dust-reddened galaxies interacting with one another.
Faint galaxy detail from APOD 14 April 2022.png
And finally, what is #6? It looks like there is a faint, slightly bluish center of some sort, surrounded by a huge faint halo. Whatever it is, I think it is too large and too faint to be a distant object. I think it is at the same distance as M96.
Ann
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Messier 96
My new version of 
