The Caldwell Objects

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two patches of concentrated light, one on either
side of the core.
Through the 4-inch NGC 4244 looks best at 72x.
The galaxy's northeastern tip points to an 11thmagnitude
star, just southwest of which glows an
irregular clump of unresolved starlight. The
southwestern tip is punctuated by a pair of 12thmagnitude
stars. Look carefully at these stars. Do
you see a faint, diffuse patch of light about
halfway back to the galaxy's core? This is yet
another stellar concentration. How do we know
it's not an enormous HII region? As early as 1961
Edwin Hubble remarked on this galaxy's lack of
HII regions. He described the galaxy as being
resolved "into stars throughout its surface. They
are individual stars and not ΗII regions."
Indeed, in a 1999 Astrophysical Journal paper,
Charles Hoopes (New Mexico State University)
and his colleagues note that "[m]ost of the HII
regions are small and faint, except for two bright
complexes on either end of the disk."
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Before you leave this field, try to locate the
magnitude-9.8 irregular galaxy NGC 4214 some
1 ° to ½ the south-southwest of NGC 4244. Seen
together in a low-power field, the two
galaxies look somewhat similar in shape
and orientation to M81 and M82, but
with diminished apparent size and
brightness. Another galaxy, NGC 4190,
lies only about 30' northwest of NGC
4214, but it went unnoticed by me. This
face-on galaxy shines at 13th magnitude
and spans a tiny 1.6'. Christian
Luginbuhl and Brian Skiff found NGC
4190 invisible in a 6-inch telescope and
difficult to view in a 12-inch.
Deep-Sky Companions; The Caldwell Objects