1999AJ....118..826I

We present the first published infrared observations of the nearby, highly obscured galaxy Dwingeloo 1 (Dw 1), including deep H-band imaging covering a total of 4'.9x4'.9, together with J and K_s imagingof the central 2'.5x2'.5. We used the small dispersion of the intrinsic infrared colors of spiral galaxies to determine an infrared H-band extinction ofA_H = 0.47±0.11 mag toward Dw 1. Using infrared colorsreduces the uncertainties in the reddening and distance by a factor of 3. The H-band magnitude, corrected for extinction, and the infrared Tully-Fisher relation are then used to estimate a distance modulusof (m-M)₀=28.62±0.27 and, thus, a distance of d=5.3^+0.7_–0.6 Mpc, which places Dw 1 at the far end of the IC 342/Maffei 1-2 group of galaxies. Our result is largely independent of the nature of the reddening law because we estimated both the reddening and the distance at the same wavelength range.