| Description | NGC 6361 is a straightforward target, but the tiny galaxy on its tail, MCG +10-25-3 is magnitude 15.8 and another story altogether. And, of course, the connecting dust lanes -- if they exist -- are even more obscure. Unfortunately, the evening's transparency, never very good, took a big hit after 20 minutes of integration, with a now thickened layer of high clouds shutting me down. It was tough to distinguish any connecting lane from general noise in the SharpCap capture... I processed the color image heavily in Affinity Photo and just managed to bring something out that suggest a dust lane. This is also one of the images where I also converted my image to grayscale and inverted it. At best, the "dust lane" is ever so slightly heavier than the background noise level, though you can see heavier noise levels "connecting" field stars, and between the tail of the spiral galaxy and a double star just slightly below and to the right, which are clearly just image artifacts. Arp's remarks are silent on 124. The Palomar plate doesn't really indicate a dust lane either and I toyed with it in Affinity, both changing levels and inverting it to positive with no effect. So the best evidence of perturbation is the slight extension of the arm of the galaxy in the direction of the Elliptical galaxy. |
