NGC 45-Faint But Beautiful

[Russ.Carpenter]

This image and text were just uploaded to Astrobin https://www.astrobin.com/ray17z/

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NGC 45-Faint But Beautiful

Here is one of the more interesting galaxies in the southern skies. NGC 45 has been imaged just a few times, probably because of its very low surface brightness.

But NGC 45 has turned out to be an ideal galaxy in which to measure photometrically its brightest stars and to search for Cepheids for calibration studies of the extragalactic distance scale. That’s because the resolution into stars is so complete, the crowding so small, the surface brightness so low, and the dust content nearly negligible.

This galaxy meets the requirements of the Catalog of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations, by Halton Arp and Barry Madore. It satisfies Category 1 (Galaxies with Interacting Companions) and Category 8 (Galaxies with Apparent Companions). According to the Catalog, one of the companions is on a spiral arm of NGC 45.

Tech Notes for ASA 500/3.6:
ASA Newtonian, 500 mm aperture, 1900mm focal length, F3.6
FLI Proline 16803, 9 mm pixel, 4096 X 4096
ASA DDM85 equatorial mount
Processing with PixInsight, StarTools, and Affinity Photo

[happy-kat]

Gosh if it is that faint not surprised you needed a light bucket to capture it. I can see three companions captured in your image. Great stuff.

[Russ.Carpenter]

Yes, that turned out to be a really interesting target. With these unknown, tiny galaxies, one is never sure what will be revealed.

Russ