NGC 450 and UGC 807, Spiral Galaxies in Cetus

NGC 450 and UGC 807
Spiral Galaxies in Cetus

Spiral Galaxies NGC 450 & UGC 807; CCD image thru 20 inch

NGC 450 is the large, bright galaxy.

This is a 10 minute exposure with an ST-6 CCD camera thru Kopernik's 20-inch F/8.1 Ritchey Chretien Cassegrain telescope. The field of view is about 5x7 arc minutes, with North at the top.

Quote from the Deep Sky Field Guide to Uranometria 2000:

NGC 450: Very small, bright nucleus; bright diffuse complex center with several very bright patches in East and Northeast. UGC 807 at one arc minute Northeast is visible through the Northeast edge.

The red shift of these spiral galaxies is very different, and thus they are probably not very close. Hubble Law distance estimates (Hubble Constant of 62 Km/sec per Mpc) are 93 million light years for NGC 450 and 600 million light years for UGC 807. Radio and spectrographic studies (Schaerer D., Contini T., Pindao M., 1999) show that the bright patches are emission nebulae similar to M-42 in our own Milky Way. However, astronomers have not determined in which of the two galaxies these nebulae lie.

NGC 450

Magnitude: 12.3

Constellation: Cetus

RA: 01h 15m 30.7s

Dec: -00° 51' 37" Epoch 2000

Size (mins): 3.1' x 2.4'

Classification: SAB(s)cd:
Mixed Barred-Non-barred Spiral, S-shaped, (uncertain)

UGC 00807

Magnitude: 15.8

Constellation: Cetus

RA: 01h 15m 35.2s

Dec: -00° 50' 47" Epoch 2000

Size (mins): 0.9' x 0.4'

Classification: Spiral Galaxy

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George Normandin, KAS

January 24th, 2001