| Other info: |
little color enhanced. Due to few exposures I had
to take some more 'bad' ones to get a nice picture, so the stars
may look like eggs.
M99, although situated in constellation Coma Berenices, is one
of the bright spiral members of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies.
It is of type Sc, rotates clockwise (unlike the nearby spiral
M100), and is unusually asymmetric, the nucleus shifted to the
upper end of our picture. This asymmetry could be due to semi-recent
encounters with other members of the Virgo Cluster, a hypothesis
which may get seconded by the fact that its recession velocity
is quite high for a Virgo Cluster member: 2324 km/sec according
to the Sky Catalog 2000.0, the highest recession velocity measured
for a Messier galaxy (and thus a Messier object at all). This
means that it is moving through the Virgo Cluster with a high
proper (or peculiar) velocity of at least about 1200 km/sec, by
chance in a direction pointing away from us |