Although dominated by the QSO nucleus, point-source subtraction clearly shows twisting spiral isophotes within the central 4 kpc, indicating either a starburst spiral disk or tidal debris. Similar features are seen optically in the inner nuclear regions (Surace et al. 1998). Wide-field deep optical imaging reveals a tidal arm extending to the NE over a distance of 60 kpc (MacKenty & Stockton 1984) which has many embedded star clusters (Surace 1998), which are too blue to see here.

Shaded contour plots of the extinction corrected 2.2 µm emission are shown together with the 1.1 µm (upper left) observed emission. In both panels, the contours and shading are logarithmic with the contours spaced by factors 2^1/2. (The level values are the same as for the figure above). The arcsec displacements in RA and DEC, given along the borders are measured from the 2.2 µm in all frames. At the upper left, a length bar is drawn. For the ratio image, both the 2.2 and 1.1 µm images were smoothed with the same adaptive smoothing and then smoothed with a Gaussian FWHM = 0.2" in calculating the 2.2 µm opacity from Eq. 3 (see text). In cases where a strong point-source or variable background contaminated the 2.2 µm image, the extinction corrected image was derived for 1.6 µm. For the galaxies with strong point-sources, the PSF was fit to the source and then subtracted and replaced by a Gaussian with the proper integrated flux (see text - NGC 7469, IRAS 08572+3915, IRAS 05189-2524, PKS 1345+12, IRAS 07598+6508, Mrk 1014 and 3C48).