... ESO 342-G017

Based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory, Paranal, Chile (VLT-UT1 Science Verification Program).

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...Yost et al. 2000)

The discovery of a faint, long, very narrow arc of light apparently associated with NGC 5907 (Shang et al. 1998) led Zheng et al. (1999) to suggest that the extended light in the galaxy might be an artifact due to confusion from the arc and foreground objects. The arc clearly contributes some light to some positions near the galaxy, but is too narrow and asymmetric to be the cause of the symmetric extended light detected by Morrison et al. (1994). Zheng et al. (1999) report that their photometry suffers from systematics at light levels fainter than R = 27 mag/sqarcsec. (Due to a large pixel size, the PSF was often undersampled, despite the seeing of 3.4 to 5.4 $^{\prime\prime}$ that was typical of their observations.) Since all detections of faint extended light in NGC 5907 have been reported for $R \geq 27$ mag/sqarcsec, and all optical photometry (including that of Zheng et al. 1999) agrees above this level, the mystery of this faint halo light remains.

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