NGC 5866: The Spindle Galaxy

Adam Nave and Christina Friberg

R.A. 15h 06.5
Dec. +55d 46'
Magnitude ~10.0
Size (min) 5.2 x 2.3
Distance 4x107 ly
The Spindle Galaxy is situated in the constellation of Draco. It is seen almost exactly edge-on. There is a fine dark dust lane, tilted by about 2 degrees against the galaxy's symmetry plane. This galaxy was often incorrectly categorized as an elliptical galaxy of type E6, because of overexposure of the dust lane. The correct classification is a lenticular galaxy of type S0_3. Lenticualr galaxies are lens-shaped spiral galaxies with a central bulge and a disk, but without discernable arms. Type S0_3 means that it is the result of a comparison of images in Sandage's Hubble Atlas of Galaxies, plate 6. NGC 5866 is part of a group of galaxies (the NGC 5866 group), which also contains NGC 5907 and 5879, as well as many fainter galaxies. From the movements of the galaxies in the group, NGC 5866's mass has been estimated at 1 trillion solar masses. It is interesting to note that NGC 5866 is possibly M102, one of the last disputed Messier objects. There is some evidence that Charles Messier may have observed this galaxy when he made the entry for M102, but it is still a topic of debate among astronomers. The above image was taken by Stephan Korth. It was taken by Bernd Koch and Stefan Korth, on 12 March 1995 at 1:09 UT with a Celestron 14 at f=4.060mm, located at the Sternwarte Aufderhö.he near Solingen, Germany. The camera was a Starlight XPress, exposure time 5m 28s. Image processing was done with PIXWIN and Corel PhotoPaint by the authors.

This is the picture we took on the Macalester Telescope using the CCD camera, on April 19th, 1999. The Spindle Galaxy is the bright oval in the upper left. The pic is the result of adding 3 black and white photos taken with different color filters, which combine to give us the color picture to the left. You can see lots of green, red and blue dots is because there is a lot of random noise in the picture. The 3 original pics were taken with 10 second exposures at medium resolution. The signal-to-noise ratio of this picture is around 10, which isn't very good.  Ways to improve the picture include increasing the resolution and the S/N ratio. Ideally, we want a high-res picture with a S/N around 100. It is possible filter out some noise from the picture to make it clearer. You can do this by taking several pictures with each color filter and combining them. This would have the effect of eliminating a lot of the random random noise while keeping the real features in the picture. Then you can combine those pictures to get a color one.

For more (and better) pictures of NGC 5866, try here.

If you have questions or comments about our work, you can e-mail Adam or Christina.