Steve Gottlieb
May 1st, 2013, 05:27 PM
I ran across this object in Vorontsov-Velyaminov's paper "Nine enigmatic new objects" (Soviet Astronomy Letters, vol. 1, p.23, 1975). He described it as "Four condensations are so arranged as to resemble a cross. The knot at the apex is a double, while the one at the bottom of the cross is elongated and larger than the others. The space between them is filled with bright diffuse radiation. Especially remarkable is the fact that this radiation gives the impression of streamers everywhere directed towards the brighter condensation. The diffuse and amorphous appearances of all the knots indicates that this complex is galactic in nature."
In VV's "Atlas of Interacting Galaxies, II" (1977), he refers to the galaxy as the "Apparition". Sounds pretty interesting! So it was on my observing list for early April when I visited Jimi Lowrey. Here's the SDSS image along with SDSS designations from release 9. By the way, Larry Mitchell assigned a MAC designation to the offset nucleus. What a strange looking galaxy -- looks like it could be a merger.
614
Much of the detail in the image was visible at the eyepiece of the 48-inch. At 488x, the core appeared moderately bright, elongated 3:2 SW-NE, 0.3'x0.2', fairly high surface brightness. Extending to the northeast is a large, low surface brightness halo, which appeared irregular and knotty. This offset halo increased the overall size of the galaxy to roughly 1.2'x0.8'. On the east end of the halo is a nearly stellar 16-17th mag knot [SDSS J131245.32+225002.1 at 50" ENE of the core]. A second low surface brightness knot is at the northeast tip [SDSS J131244.92+225017.9 at 1.0' NE of the core]. A third very low contrast knot is 40" NE of the core (SDSS J131243.49+225018.1). PGC 1677429 = 2MASX J13124913+2251519 lies 2.6' NE and appeared faint, small, round, 18" diameter.
In VV's "Atlas of Interacting Galaxies, II" (1977), he refers to the galaxy as the "Apparition". Sounds pretty interesting! So it was on my observing list for early April when I visited Jimi Lowrey. Here's the SDSS image along with SDSS designations from release 9. By the way, Larry Mitchell assigned a MAC designation to the offset nucleus. What a strange looking galaxy -- looks like it could be a merger.
614
Much of the detail in the image was visible at the eyepiece of the 48-inch. At 488x, the core appeared moderately bright, elongated 3:2 SW-NE, 0.3'x0.2', fairly high surface brightness. Extending to the northeast is a large, low surface brightness halo, which appeared irregular and knotty. This offset halo increased the overall size of the galaxy to roughly 1.2'x0.8'. On the east end of the halo is a nearly stellar 16-17th mag knot [SDSS J131245.32+225002.1 at 50" ENE of the core]. A second low surface brightness knot is at the northeast tip [SDSS J131244.92+225017.9 at 1.0' NE of the core]. A third very low contrast knot is 40" NE of the core (SDSS J131243.49+225018.1). PGC 1677429 = 2MASX J13124913+2251519 lies 2.6' NE and appeared faint, small, round, 18" diameter.