More Better Redshift

I just received a response from NASA on the questions I raised in this post about redshift data that seemed incorrect. NASA responded that they have fixed the errors in the redshift data provided on their web pages. The new corrected data is shown in the chart above and looks much nicer.

The only flaws left are two different redshift values given for a distance of 12 BLY and redshift data for ACO 3341 which seems out of sync. The two different values for 12 BLY can be written off as a rounding error that occurs when the distance is simplified for the use in the press release. The ACO 3341 data was not provided by NASA. It was provided by the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO). Just to wrap things up, I'll send them an e-mail and see if I can get an explanation or correction to their data, but things are looking pretty good now. LATE EDIT: Olivier Hainaut of the ESO has responded the redshift z and distance data released on the web page contained a typo and has been corrected. The page now gives the distance as "almost 500MLy". My thanks to him for taking the time to do this.

I'd like to thank the folks at the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Dr. Tom Bridgman, and reader jeant8 who is so smart she must work for NASA and if not, should, for working to clear up all this.

In the course of all this, some links to some pretty interesting Astronomy websites were provided. I'll reproduce those, along with sources for the new data, below.

Useful Links

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey http://www.sdss.org/ and http://www.sdss.org/dr7/products/spectra/index.html and http://cas.sdss.org/dr7/en/
The SDSS has a publicly accessible database of images and data for 25% of the sky. Proper use of this database requires a bit of skill but there are tutorials provided.

The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/
A Photoshop plugin for working with data in the FITS format. FITS data is what is produced by the SDSS public database.

NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/
Data on extragalactic objects. Easier to use that SDSS.

Ned Wright's Cosmology Calculator
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html and http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm
A Javascript calculator for determining distance values based on different values for redshift z, the Hubble Constant, and the Omega M and Omega Vacuum constants. The second link provides an introduction to cosmology.

CDS http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/cats/cats.html
A collection of tables and such taken from published astronomy papers.

THE HUBBLE CONSTANT http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~huchra/hubble/
John Huchra's website explaining the Hubble constant

Communicating Astronomy with the Public http://www.capjournal.org/index.php
A journal devoted to communicating astronomy facts to the public.

Distance of Virgo, Coma and other clusters http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/1990ApJ...350..110C and http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/1991ASSL..169..451O and http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/1996AAS...189.1204B and http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/abs/1997ApJ...483L..37T and http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0001402 and http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0512349
Papers discussing this issue.

NOTES
Redshift z values are multiplied by 10,000 in the charts I provided. This was done so they'd be on a similar scale to distance values, otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them in the charts that had scales large enough to show distances. Scaling the redshift z values in this way does not affect the results I discuss here.

DATA


REFERENCES
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/perseus/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2009/stephq/
http://www.eso.org/gallery/v/ESOPIA/GalaxyClusters/phot-09i-02.jpg.html
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/a400/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0150/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/1999/0087/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/abell2029/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/1182/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/clusters/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/clusters/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/clusters/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/4c37/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/1999/0166/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/clusters/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/clusters/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/clusters/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/clusters/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/rdcs1252/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/4c41/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2005/smg/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/4c41/
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2003/gb1508/