Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cygnus (Cyg)  ·  Contains:  PGC 63552  ·  TYC3557-204-1  ·  TYC3557-2254-1  ·  TYC3557-2304-1  ·  TYC3557-429-1
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UGC 11466, lowenthalm
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UGC 11466

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
UGC 11466, lowenthalm
Powered byPixInsight

UGC 11466

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

This a nice little galaxy peeks just above the galactic plane of the Milky Way in Cygnus. The distance measurement on this in SIMBAD has some scatter from different results over the last 10 years or so, but seems to average out to somewhere between 40 to 48 million light years away from us, with a recession velocity of between 821 and 857 km/s. Given its angular dimensions of 1.5 by 2 arc minutes (at least in my image!), this would roughly make this galaxy's size a fairly small 22,000 by 29,000 light years.

The morphology is pretty interesting, which is why I imaged it as I wanted to see better what was going on here. There weren't any decent images that I could find online other than what was in the PanSTARRS and DSS databases in SIMBAD, so I wasn't sure what I would get. The morphology listed in SIMBAD is "3", which seems like a computer glitching rather than a galaxy type! To me it looks like an edge on spiral that has recently completed an interaction with and absorption of another galaxy causing its core to bloat out and look a lot more like an elliptical galaxy. In fact, it looks a lot like a much closer ("only" 12 million light years away) and less dramatic version of NGC 5128 (Centaurus A). It even has the same undulating disk. Physics scales nicely: Cenaurus A is about 90,000 light years across, so its 4 times larger than UGC 11466. You can see an example of NGC5128 here:

https://www.astrobin.com/168798/

Each of the 12 images stacked for this image was composed of 320 x 1.5 second exposures live-stacked in SharpCap.

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