| Description | Amorphous spiral arms indeed! They are shaped a bit like loose outer leaves of skunk cabbage, with the nucleus as flower. During capture the amorphous arms were just perceptible on my SharpCap live stack, which means that post-processing was required to make them visible in the final web images. The core and central disk are quite evident, but the arms are diaphanous. Arp's remarks also call out an absorption, the zit-like feature on the SSW (1 o'clock) edge of the nucleus: "Very faint diffuse outer arms, absorption one side of nucleus". Interesting that it's the diffuse arms he chooses to categorize. |
