This is my shrine to NGC 6251's extraordinary radio jet. You'll
find a variety of representations of the same high-resolution image I made
with A-array data from the VLA. The beam is elliptical
(about 1.2 x 1.7 arcseconds in size) and is aligned roughly NE-SW.
What's so amazing about this jet is the fact that it's so well collimated (to within ~4 degrees) from pc to Mpc scales. The images below show the jet out to ~4 kpc (that's about 13000 light years or 1013 km). My image doesn't show any structure further out (like the Mpc-scale lobes), as the high-resolution A-array on the VLA isn't sensitive to the low-surface-brightness emission from these regions.
The first three pictures are different types of false-colour maps. The images are fairly self-explanatory - brighter or warmer colours mean more emission. The core of the galaxy is in the bottom left-hand corner and there are several bright `knots' of material (relativistic particles like electrons) along the jet. If you prefer greyscale, click here. There is also a contour map - you can get the nice PostScript version or a relatively poor `grabbed' gif version of it here.
Here is the greyscale version of the map.
Here is the contour version of the map. The lowest contour is at 4-sigma above the noise (which is 73 micro-Janskys).
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