Sorry about the title typo. Arp 152 is the correct designation.
Arp 152 is one of the most famous Arp galaxies and often in the news. Here's a link to such a current news item.
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/07...d-astronomers/ It has one of the universe's largest fireworks going off in its core, powered by a giant black hole. This creates the jet. It is the jet that put it in Arp's catalog of course. While we only think of M87 when galactic jets are mentioned Arp has 4 of them in his catalog. Two were well placed this spring and I hoped to image them along with M87 but thanks to the perpetual clouds this didn't happen. I've attached 3 different processing version of this one image; one processed normally except the core has been reduced to show the jet, one a closeup 2x enlargement of the core and jet region processed just for the jet and one that is annotated to show other galaxies in the field. The last is made from a very differently processed image to hold down bandwidth.
M87 is one of the anchor galaxies of the Virgo cluster. It's mass along with that of a couple other super massive elliptical galaxies seem to define the center of this cluster. One of these M49 was in a previous update. I've reduced the brightness of M87 considerably to allow the jet to be seen. I believe but can't prove that many of the star-like points around and within the the galaxy that make it appear to be in a faint star cluster are really some of its many globular star clusters.
The 2x enlargement of M87's core region is at 0.5" per pixel. The core is the star like point and the jet the linear feature pointing back to the core. Suspected globulars are seen in the enlargment, some quite oval others just irregular in shape. Some may be distant galaxies or field stars.
The field is rather interesting as it contains members of the Virgo cluster and many background galaxies. See the annotated image to identify the various galaxies. All with NGC or IC numbers as well as PGC41495 are members of the Virgo cluster and are thus about 50 to 60 million light years away. Many of the galaxies I have identified that are not cluster members have no red shift data that I was able to find. Those that do are listed below.
UGC7652 is a pair of galaxies. Not how red they are. They shine right through the stars of M87. This pair is 1.1 billion light years away.
The most distant galaxy in the image is SDSS J123013.96+122230.0 at 2.9 billion light years.
SDSS J123152.76+122824.9 which looks little different from the above galaxy is only one third as far away at 0.93 billion light years.
PGC 169454 1.4 billion light years
PGC 139910 1.2 billion light years
PGC 41285 1.1 billion light years
PGC 169422 1.5 billion light years
The rest of the PGC galaxies have no red shift data that I was able to find.
Arp's image of the jet with the 200" scope is at:
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level...ig_arp152.jpeg
This was a processing nightmare for me. I've been working on it for weeks now. Getting the core, galaxy and possible globulars to all show in one smooth image was difficult. I had to make three images, one for each feature and then layer them in so the seams didn't show. Thank goodness for all of Photoshop's layering options, I think I used most of them.
14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME
Rick