Galaxies NGC 6548 & NGC 6549

Galaxies NGC 6548 and NGC 6549

This is a 10 minute exposure with an ST-6 CCD camera thru Kopernik's 20-inch F/8.1 Ritchey Chretien Cassegrain telescope. The field of view is about 5x7 arc minutes.

NGC 6548 is a lenticular galaxy with a round, dim, and featureless disk of stars and a small bright nucleus embedded in a bar. A re-observation of NGC 6548 was also included in New General Catalog as NGC 6550.

NGC 6549 is a more distant edge-on spiral galaxy. A small extension from the plane of the galaxy is either a jet of material, or perhaps a close companion galaxy.

These galaxies in the constellation of Hercules probably just lie along the same line of sight. They have very different red shifts and there is no sign of interaction. The table below shows rough red-shift (Hubble Constant of 62 Km/sec per Mpc) based distance and diameter estimates for these galaxies.

NGC 6548 (also NGC 6550)

Magnitude: 12.4

RA: 18h 05m 59.0s

Dec: +18° 35' 12" Epoch 2000

Size (mins): 2.9' x 2.8'

Distance: 114 Million Light Years

Diameter: 99,800 Light Years

Classification: SB0
Barred Lenticular
Galaxy

NGC 6549

Magnitude: 14.7

RA: 18h 05m 49.9s

Dec: +18° 32' 18" Epoch 2000

Size (mins): 1.4' x 0.4'

Distance: 353 Million Light Years

Diameter: 143,000 Light Years

Classification: Spiral Galaxy

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George Normandin, KAS

December 18th, 2000