NGC 3628 and 300,000ly Tidal Tail (LRGB) (Jared Willson)

NGC 3628 and 300,000ly Tidal Tail (LRGB)

Revision title: Modified Stretch

NGC 3628, sometimes called the 'hamburger galaxy' or 'Sarah's galaxy' is the dimmest galaxy of the famed Leo Triplet. It is about thirty-five million light years from Earth and is classified as an unbarred spiral, though some suspect it is actually a barred spiral with the bar seen end-on. The presence of a bar may account for the relatively faint 'x' shaped bulge. A dust lane in the outer parts of the spiral arms almost perfectly bisects NGC 3628.

In 1956, Fritz Zwicky of Cal Tech, while reviewing photographic plates taken with the 48" Schmidt Camera on Mt. Palomar, noticed a faint extension roughly ten arc minutes in length to the east of NGC 3628. In a later photographic plate taken in 1974 by Kormendy and Bahcall using the 200" Hale telescope, then the largest telescope in the world, the plume was seen to extend for roughly forty arc minutes not ten. That corresponds to an actual length of roughly 260,000 ly given current distance measurements to NGC 3628. Follow-up studies in the late 70's were made to try and determine the source of this plume. It is believed that the plume is a 'tidal tail' of stars stripped out of NGC 3628 from a close encounter with M66, one of the other three galaxies in the Leo Triplet. Computer simulations suggest the interaction was roughly 800,000,000 years ago. The tidal tail includes four distinct star forming regions, as determined by Chromey et al in a 1995 study using the 0.6m Burrell Schmidt telescope at Kitt Peak.

Typically, this galaxy is framed to include the other members of the Leo Triplet. However, I wanted to focus on the tidal tail and rich background of distant galaxies in Leo, so I framed and cropped this image without M65 and M66.

Original
C
D
Final
E

C

Title: Annotated Version

Description: Galaxies without a catalog reference are from the PGC catalog

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: Modified Crop

Description: Decided I didn't like the "glow" at the bottom right of image that came from the 7th magnitude star HD 98388, so widened the crop slightly to show the star itself. Also, every slightly different processing on the RGB layer of the image.

Uploaded: ...

E

Title: Modified Stretch

Description: Modified the stretch to enhance the visibility of the tail and halos around some dimmer background galaxies

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9285800
PixInsight job	87LWEJP2P8AIMCXLHTLSLJW4Z2IENUDK
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	11h21m27s.551
RA (top/left)	11h23m52s.750
RA (top/right)	11h18m58s.819
RA (bottom/right)	11h19m02s.766
RA (bottom/left)	11h23m55s.859

Dec (center)	+13°36′12″.93
Dec (top/left)	+14°00′34″.48
Dec (top/right)	+13°59′17″.98
Dec (bottom/right)	+13°11′45″.90
Dec (bottom/left)	+13°13′02″.10

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