Brett’s Pancake – NGC7814

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Brettspancake-Wide BrettsPancakeCloseUp

I picked a Milky Way-like spiral galaxy that is edge-on and has a cool dust lane to show Brett on a visit to my observatory. Known by some as the “Little Sombrero Galaxy”; I prefer the moniker Brett’s Pancake Galaxy! It is spiral galaxy 40 million light-years distant in the Pegasus square and is not often imaged. This galaxy is only 5.5 arcmin diameter so the coolest images I have seen have been taken by Ken Crawford with a 20-inch RCOS and Adam Block with a 32-inch RCOS (links below). I wondered if I could detect globular clusters in my attached 30-hour LRGB close-up image but those are numerous anonymous galaxies in the background, not globulars. I went to the Hubble Telescope archive (link below) and studied the images of NGC7814 for globulars based on an article written in 2003 and could not detect them! Be my guest and show me where they are! Apparently, even the Hubble data required point spread function (PSF) photometry and deconvolution algorithms to ferret out the globs which are almost stellar, start as bright as 21st magnitude and get fainter! Guess it’s those things beyond our grasp that keep us hungry to explore. I believe those are two faint dwarf galaxies of NGC7814 at 6 and 8 o’clock positions in my attached “wide” image!

http://hla.stsci.edu/hlaview.html — Hubble Legacy Archive – put in NGC7814, look for globulars! They claim there are 200!