| Abstract | The extinction of Maffei 1 has been measured by two new techniques. First, BV aperture photometry has been performed to obtain the color excess from standard aperture-color relations for early-type galaxies. Secondly, millimeter and radio observations of galactic CO and H I have been used to calculate the total hydrogen column density along the line-of-sight, and thereby estimate the color excess from the local dust-to-gas ratio. After consideration of all extinction measurements to date, it is concluded that Av = 5.1 + or - 0.2 mag. The isophotal diameter and the corrected apparent visual magnitude are estimated to be about 15 arcmin and about 6.3 respectively (assuming type E), making Maffei 1 one of the biggest and brightest galaxies in the sky. The distance is found to be 2.1 + 1.3 or - 0.8 Mpc, indicating that Maffei 1 is probably associated with the Ursa Major-Camelopardalis cloud, not the Local Group. The primary source of error in the distance is now the uncertainty in the central velocity dispersion. |
