CALIFA and HST data of UGC3995; more IFU data! more occulting galaxy pairs!

Sometimes a projects just rolls. Last fall, the first data-release of the CALIFA project came out. Pinged Bill about it and next thing I know he identified UGC 3995 as an interesting pair.
It is one of the few pairs with existing HST data; there is a WFPC2 from 1994 in Johnson-V.

So I played around with python scripts during my observing run on La Palma. Maps and Figures rolled out smoothly. Text for the paper followed suit. Back & forth with Bill and there it was!

This makes two occulting pairs with HST observations and IFU observations. Single pair papers have gone as far as I can take it now though. Now I need a larger sample. HST observations and more IFU cubes. CALIFA has some. HST proposal is in...

but for now...

accepted!

Integral Field Unit observations of an occulting pair of galaxies

Back in 2009, I published a paper on an occulting galaxy pair that JD (Prof. Dalcanton) found in her ANGST survey. She showed me the jpeg and I was off to the races. Paper came with a moderate amount of stick as the image became a Hubble Heritage picture. And it's still in use as my background, twitter icon and what have you.

Hey! it's *my* image now.

So as part of a follow-up campaign, I asked the ATCA to perform HI line observations (neutral gas) and the Very Large Telescope (no kidding non-astronomers) for Integral Field Unit observations. The cool thing about those is that you get a spectrum for every pixel in your image. Compare two spectra, one in the overlap and one tangentially across from it and you get the extinction curve which tells you something about the composition of fine dust particles in the foreground spiral galaxies. For that particular bit of the foreground disk. Neat. It works. Very well....

Now I need...oh a dozen or more of these kind of observations. The ESO proposal is in of course but the paper on the VIMOS observations is also accepted! Proofing and done!

you can find the pre-print here.