Intrinsic shape of elliptical galaxy NGC 661

We investigated the intrinsic shape of the luminosity density of the triaxial galaxy NGC 661 by comparing its observed profiles of photometric parameters with the projected surface brightness of model galaxies. We consider triaxial luminosity distributions which have managable forms, but would still reproduce the details of the profiles of the photometric parameters reasonably well. We found strong correlations among some of the projected properties when a model is viewed in all possible orientations. These correlations are used to constrain the most likely values of the average intrinsic shape parameters of the galaxy, independent of the viewing angles. We examined NGC 661 which is a featureless galaxy and shows a small scale variation in the ellipticity profile at ~ 0.3 r_e. Position angle increases slightly with the distance and the higher order Fourier coefficients are practically zero.