First off, many apologies that I totally forgot it was my week and I was out of town till now. Anyhow,…
VV 289 is one of the many examples from the VV Catalogue, Part I. I observed it at GSSP 2013 under NELM 6.7 skies.
The following is a brief discussion from the observing guide available on my website, just to give some background on this catalogue.
Dr. Boris Vorontsov-Velyaminov (1904-1994) of Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow University, created a series of lists of interacting galaxies starting in 1959. A majority of the systems were found on the POSS plates from the Palomar 48-inch Schmidt astrograph. The original list, Part I, contained 355 systems. It should be noted that the more famous list, Arp Peculiar Galaxies, was done AFTER Boris’s list. Approximately half of Boris’s Part I list was listed as an Arp as Boris’s paper was the inspiration for Arp’s list. Dr. Halton Arp has access to the 200-inch reflector, which in turn gives Arp the ability to dig deeper and get a clearer image of the structure within these galaxies. As Steve Gottlieb pointed out, a number of Vorontsov-Velyaminov “nests” and chains turned out to be late-type single dwarf irregulars (eg VV124 and VV104) with active star formations regions mimicking the appearance of multiple galaxies.
Then in 1977, Vorontsov-Velyaminov (V-V) published Part II of his list, containing an additional 497 interacting systems, labeled as VV356 through VV852. Lastly, in 2001, an additional 1162 objects were added from the Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies by Vorontsov-Velyaminov et al. These objects have numbers ranging from VV853 to VV2014.
V-V has classified each interacting galaxies within several categories, and for most objects, he classified some unique details. Categories include M-51 types, Nested galaxies, Pairs of galaxies, Chain of galaxies, Ring galaxies and Enigmatic galaxies. Some details he listed include tails, bridges and disruptions to list a few. A full table listing the categories and details is on page 28.
V-V was interested in M-51 type systems, interacting of multiple systems (nests and chains), tidal theory of bridges and tails. I believe that his work has profound impact on near future work on these classes of objects.
I just picked one of many VV objects I observed, I’ve observed better ones and others are much tougher. Someone asked me what was my highlight of last night. So I answered this object. I spent a bit more time than usual as I was trying to see if I could see traces of the long arms of the barred spiral galaxy.
One of the very many cool VV objects.
22" (255, 305, 377 and 458x) (NELM 6.7)
VV 289a – Considerably faint 3:1 elongated glow with defined edges. Very slightly brighter center. PA = 100 and 30” long. After sitting at the eyepiece, the north arm popped in and out. Visible about 25% of the time. Arm is about 30” long. A faint 17th magnitude star is just off the east end.
VV 289b – considerably faint 2:1 elongated even surface brightness glow. Defined edges. 20” across and PA = 90. Lies 0.7’ SE from VV 289a. Very slightly fainter than VV 289a.
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