Jimi Lowrey
October 7th, 2016, 03:41 PM
This week I was joined by Akarsh Simha for a observing run here at my observatory in Fort Davis. The highlight of this run for me was our observation of the dwarf galaxies Pisces A&B. This is a link to a paper were observations were made by the HST https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.03487 There are great HST images of Pisces A&B in this paper.
SDSS Pisces A
2283
Pisces A was seen as a extremely faint small glow with AV at 375X only a small percent of the time. It appeared only as faint brightening of the background. I was not sure I was seeing it but when I would slew the scope the faint glow would move with the star field. I was not sure at first that we would be able to see this dwarf but we were both sure of or observations. This galaxy is not in the local group but is in the local volume.
SDSS Pisces B
2284
Pisces B was much easier to see it was direct vision at 488X as a faint extended object with a slight brightening on one end . I was surprised that it was not more difficult as was Pisces A. I contacted the author of the paper(Eric Tollerud) and he was shocked that we could see these dwarf's with our eyes.
SDSS Pisces A
2283
Pisces A was seen as a extremely faint small glow with AV at 375X only a small percent of the time. It appeared only as faint brightening of the background. I was not sure I was seeing it but when I would slew the scope the faint glow would move with the star field. I was not sure at first that we would be able to see this dwarf but we were both sure of or observations. This galaxy is not in the local group but is in the local volume.
SDSS Pisces B
2284
Pisces B was much easier to see it was direct vision at 488X as a faint extended object with a slight brightening on one end . I was surprised that it was not more difficult as was Pisces A. I contacted the author of the paper(Eric Tollerud) and he was shocked that we could see these dwarf's with our eyes.