A couple of Arp Peculiars sketched

Over the summer I acquired both Alvin Huey's and Kanipe & Webb's Arp Peculiar Galaxies books, but I'm a bit embarrassed to say that I hadn't used either in anger yet. I finally got a chance to correct that on Thurs night.

This was a short session due to having spent all day cooking. I was also using a plan that had been prepared for October (which lay unused due to cloudcover) -- so I just picked a couple of the later (RA-wise) ones which were still fairly well-placed.

Conditions were mixed: better than average seeing for my site, but worse than average transparency.

Arp331 11/27/2008 23:30UT; Pickering 8, NELM 5, SQM 20.4

5 direct-vision plus 1 averted-vision galaxies. NGC383 the brightest, but 380/379 readily visible to the NNE and 384/385 somewhat less so to the S. NGC386 could only be teased out with averted vision; holdable perhaps 35% of the time but easily re-acquired.

NGC380 has stellar core; NGC379 slightly larger but with a less condensed core. NGC383 has largest core, elongated somewhat NNE-SSW. NGC384 and 385 show very weak semi-stellar cores under averted vision.

Note: Arp331 is probably an example of where I should have gone out with a chart -- I expect with a bit of prompting and knowing where to look I could have found NGC387 and possibly even 388. But I still have a preference for taking my first observation of a target "blind" (so that I'm unbiased in recording what I see).

Arp158 11/27/2008 23:55UT; Pickering 8, NELM 5, SQM 20.4

Small elongated streak, but without the swelling so typical of edge-on spirals or lenticular galaxies. Two brighter knots, both semi-stellar in appearance; one at E end and second about 2/3 of the way to the W end, connected by a brighter bar. Dimmer knot between the other two not seen, nor was the exceedingly faint extension to the ESE.

Cheers,
-- Jeff

Lovely work Jeff and I see you can post images within a post

Deirdre Kelleghan
PRO IFAS

Deirdre --

Yeah, I just ignore the buttons and such in the message editor and insert "[ img ]http://whatever...[ /img ]" directly into the post.

(Note: I added spaces around the square braces in the example above so they wouldn't get interpreted as images -- you don't want to do that for a real image.)

Cheers,
-- Jeff.

Very nice work as always Jeff.

Michael.

Thanks, Michael!

Thought I'd get another go last night, but we got fogged out.

-- Jeff.

Oops... in my post above about posting images I incorrectly had angle braces earlier. They should be square braces. (I've now fixed the original post.)

Cheers,
-- Jeff.