Daily Image

30-09-2016
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Dwingeloo-1 revisited

Submitter: Albert van Duin
Description: The Dwingeloo 1 galaxy (a.k.a. PGC100170) was discovered with the venerable Dwingeloo Radio telescope in 1994 while performing the Dwingeloo Obscured Galaxy Survey (DOGS), which searched for neutral hydrogen (HI) radio emissions at the wavelength of 21 cm from objects in the so-called Zone of Avoidance. This is the region of sky where dust of our own Galaxy obscures much of the visible light from objects behind it. Only red and infrared light and radio waves will penetrate this dust. So Dwingeloo 1 was discovered in radio emission, but it is (just) detectable in visible light too! Although Dwingeloo 1 seems very faint, it is actually very nearby, only 10 million lightyears away from us.

The image above is a stack of 17 red-filtered integrations of 600s each, made with a cooled CCD camera mounted on a 0.4m telescope in Beilen. I will try to acquire some more images using different filters to create an L-RGB colour image. This photo-negative representation shows the shape of these faint galaxies a bit better. The barred spiral Dwingeloo 1 with faintly visible spiral arms is in the middle of the image, the faint blob a bit lower is another galaxy: PGC166069.
Copyright: Albert van Duin
 
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