High-Resolution Hα Velocity Fields of Nearby Spiral Galaxies with the Southern African Large Telescope

In an effort to test ΛCDM predictions of galaxy mass distributions, we have obtained spectrophotometric observations of several nearby spiral galaxies with the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) Fabry-Pérot (FP) interferometer as part of the RSS Imaging spectroscopy Nearby Galaxy Survey. Utilizing the SALT FP's 8 arcmin field of view and 2 arcsec angular resolution, we have derived 2D velocity fields of the Hα emission line to high spatial resolution at large radii. We have modeled these velocity fields with the DiskFit software package and found them to be in good agreement with lower-resolution velocity fields of the HI 21 cm line for the same galaxies. Here we present our Hα kinematic map of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 578. At the distance to this galaxy (22 Mpc), our kinematic data has a spatial resolution of 185 pc and extends to galactocentric radii of 13 kpc. The high spatial resolution of this data allows us to resolve the inner rising part of the rotation curves, which is compromised by beam smearing in lower-resolution observations. We are using these Hα kinematic data, combined with HI 21 cm kinematics and broadband photometric observations, to place constraints on NGC 578's mass distribution.