The end of this observing run made up for the unnecessarily interesting variety of weather early on. Calm, clear skies, ran through an object list just as fast as we said in the proposal. Here’s a montage of the red-light images from 9 of the target galaxy pairs done on night 4.

That’s it for this run. But we’ll be back there late next month to really clean up the target list.

The forecast for tonight’s continued imaging of Galaxy Zoo overlapping galaxies was marginal, with a storm expected. That has not yet materalizd, ut the wind have been so high that, after the anemometer flirted with the 72-km/hour safety limit for two hours after sunset, I finally had to shut down a little whole ago. There are data on two pairs so far tonight, and I’ll naturally keep one eye on the wind speed. If it drops back, I’ll open again.

Meanwhile, there has been time to look over last night’s data and do some basic processing. Here, for example, is a quick and dirty composite image of Markarian 238 and its larger spiral companion from B and R images. The display is set to show the inner structures most clearly.

Some random thoughts while observing: Cherry Pepsi cans look really weird under a red flashlight. And email today brought some encouraging news on another Galaxy Zoo science front.

(0710 UT, three hours later) The wind continues to howl under a frustratingly clear sky; some clouds are just appearing which may be parts of the predicted storm system. Gusts up to 83 mph (133 km/hour) have been recorded in the last hour. With the outside temperature less than 2 C, I try not to think of the wind chill.

(0220 UT) All set up to start work. Worrying clouds have at least temporarily receded. While being checked out by a staff member to make sure I won’t break things, I’ve checked the telescope pointing on a couple of bright stars (Castor and Pollux, in fact) and am just waiting another few minutes for it to get dark enough to critically focus the CCD camera and TV acquisition system. Then off, for starters, to a couple of galaxies that SDSS data suggest might have very extended dust lanes beyond the optical disk.

(I’ll plan to update this over time).

And to all you cosmic partiers, happy Yuri’s Night!

(0345 UT) Got data in B and I filters on one pair, suggested particularly by JeanTate on the forum thread, but those images are pretty ugly because of stray charge from bright stars that will take some processing to fix. Now off to our best case for a spiral with extended dust and no sign of interaction to cause this.

(0507 UT) Looked at SDSS 103427.72+102506.2, still seeing evidence of dust lanes very far out in the galaxy disk. Now doing an edge-on system with dwarfish companion in front.

(0830 UT) Still working away between cloud patches. Now have data on SDSS 1002+1413, UGC 5528, NGC 3605/7. Working on NGC 4377. Reached the stage of night where Mahler seems appropriate to keep alert.

(1025 UT) Nice images of Mkn 238. Now taking a detour, Kazarian 199 for the AGN=companion Galaxy Zoo project. Data from the SARA 1m suggest [O III] clouds which might trace ionization cones, so I’m taking a closer look with the larger telescope. About 1.5 hours left in the night if I arrange the last couple of exposures with their filters in the right order.

How is the latest set of telescopic followups to a Galaxy Zoo project like the aftermath when Moria was delved? One has dwarfs and one had dwarves, and both were dusty. (Look, if you think that’s nerdy, I could have made a reference to First Age history).

Incoming data! This week I’m headed up to the 2.1m telescope of Kitt Peak National Observatory for more followup images of overlapping galaxies. This piece of the project traces to a serendipitous discovery in Hubble data which were intended to study the populations of stars in the outskirts of NGC 253, itself 10 million light-ears away. At the 2008 Austin meeting of the American Astronomical Society, the same one at which we saw the first spectrum of Hanny’s Voorwerp, Julianne Dalcanton of the University of Washington tracked down Benne Holwerda and me to show us this galaxy pair, which rejoices in the designation 2MASX J00482185-2507365:

Analysis of the dust in the smaller foreground galaxy showed something unusual – there are filaments of dust extending well beyond where we can detect the starlight in its disk. This had us looking for similar cases in the Galaxy Zoo overlap catalog, which should turn them up if any known sample will. It would be important to know whether many galaxies have such distant dust – first because it could alter calculations of how much extinction light from distant objects suffers as it passes intervening galaxies, and in addition because the connection between stars and the production of dust suggests that such galaxies have a complex history of the creation and transport of dust.

Our sample for this observing run centers on galaxy pairs broadly similar to 2MASX (what I wrote above). This kind of galaxy – small, perhaps true dwarfs, with dust in its outskirts – if common, would solve a question posed by recent statistical data from the European Space Agency’s massive Herschel infrared observatory (continuing its mission at four times the Moon’s distance as long as the liquid helium lasts). In the whole population of galaxies seen in deep surveys, some of their IR spectra would be best explained if a significant amount of their dust is so cold that it must lie far from the galaxy’s stars order not to absorb enough energy to heat it further. Our approach is to take CCD images with much longer exposures than the SDSS data, so we get better data quality in the outskirts of the galaxies and could detect dust filaments like those seen in 2MASX – whatsitsnnme.

The weather forecast at this point suggests that I may get about half of the time over our four scheduled nights (we have more next month). Watch this space for progress reports…