|Right Ascension|| 12 : 28.2 (h:m)
|Declination|| +44 : 06 (deg:m)
|Distance|| 13,700 (kly)
|Visual brightness|| 9.4 (mag)
|Apparent dimension||5.1 arc min)|
NGC 4449 was one of William Herschel's discoveries; he found it on April 27, 1788.
NGC 4449 is a Magellanic dwarf galaxy and a member of the nearby Canes Venaticorum group of galaxies. The morphology and absolute size is remarkably similar to our neighbour galaxy LMC (Large Magellanic Cloud). The bar consists of a population of stars with an age older than five million years.The red regions in the upper northern part of the image which emit most of their light in the H-alpha line are HII regions with embedded ongoing star formation. There are several bluish white star clusters visible, some of them near filaments of dust which provide the fuel for future star formation. In the western part of the image (right hand side) there is an isolated supergiant shell of H-alpha emission which probably is ionized by the central cluster of stars. Radio observations in the HI line show that NGC 4449 is embedded in a huge gaseous halo with a diameter of 14 times the optical one.
The image in this page was obtained by Sven Kohle and Till Credner of the University of Bonn with the 1m, f=3680mm telescope of the Hoher List observatory and HoLiCam, 2048^2 CCD receiver. This image is a composite of B: 42m, V: 12m, I: 9m, H_alpha: 20m exposures, taken on 25 March 1998, 1:00 UT and 8 March 1997, 0:00 UT. The exposures are represented in blue (B), green (V) and red (I + H-alpha) color, respectively.
Hartmut Frommert [contact]