This rather odd looking object in the center is a large intermediate spiral, NGC 3227, that is interacting with a dwarf elliptical galaxy, NGC 3226. Intermediate refers to it being between a barred and unbarred spiral galaxy. Together these cosmic tidal dance partners are known as Arp 94 and are approximately 60 million light-years away in the constellation Leo.

NGC 3227 is a Seyfert galaxy which means it has an active galactic nucleus and releases huge amounts of energy in the form of X-rays. As with most Seyfert galaxies which contain black holes, this one has a supermassive black hole in its core.

I really like the very distorted outer regions of the interacting galaxies and also the flocculating structure near the core. There appears to be a dense lobe in the faint outer region on both sides which I am guessing may be drawfs or parts of arms torn off by tidal forces. Neither galaxy seems to show much color variation but I kind of like the golden color. The rest of the field is loaded with galaxies of all types and sizes although they all appear small since they are much further away. Some of these smaller galaxies appear to be in clusters. Some of the highlights are NGC 3222 located on the central right at approximately 178 million ly; PGC 3754953 located on the top at approximately 102 million ly; PGC 30397 and PGC 1065532 located on the lower right at approximately 120 million ly and are most likely interacting.

I imaged this over four nights, however, I only used two nights worth of data proving that less data is better - Ha Ha. Normally it would be a weather issue but what happened on the third night is more sinister. When the session was done I removed the dew shield and I noticed the corrector plate was covered in dew. My first thought was that the dew ring was broken, however, upon closer examination I saw that I never connected it! I know some of you imagers in certain regions probably don't know what a dew heater is but they are a necessity in the northeast. On the last night of imaging it appeared to be clear but the seeing was not good so I did not use it. Originally I started making an image using all the data after running Subframe Selector but after seeing how the image looked I stacked them night by night and saw the degradation. So out of the 307 total exposures, only 140 were used.

Another issue I had was a weird circular reflection which turned out to be from the bright star Algieba in Leo. I was able to do a bit of processing to get rid of it.