I was now flipping through my copy of The de Vaucouleurs Atlas of Galaxies (Buta, Corwin, Odewahn, Cambridge, 2007) and to my surprise found out that “faint fuzzies” is a scientific term. Here is the passage from page 108:
Larsen and Brodie (2000) discovered a new class of star clusters in NGC 1023, called “faint fuzzies”. These clusters are larger than typical open or globular clusters by a factor of ~4 on average, and in NGC 1023 they appear distributed in a ring-like configuration. Burkert, Brodie, and Larsen (2005) suggest that these unusual clusters form in the galaxy-galaxy interactions that transform a disk galaxy into an S0.
Just incidentally, I observed some peculiarities in the brightness distribution within NGC 1023 visually that I could not explain by looking at survey images. http://ivm-deep-sky.blogspot.com/201...n-perseus.html (halfway down the page)
They are visible on the specially processed image in the Atlas and seem to correlate to a degree with the distribution of the normal open clusters (top right panel in figure 11 of the first paper).
Last edited by Ivan Maly; April 11th, 2013 at 05:48 PM.
Interesting as I came up with my website in 2003...independent to the papers reference above. My thinking is that stuff I look at appears as faint fuzzies through the eyepiece.
Faint Fuzzies
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