The Waterbug Galaxy (NGC-5033) and friends (Roger Nichol)

The Waterbug Galaxy (NGC-5033) and friends

Capturing this has been a background activity for a while, filling in time while other targets were below my horizon in the early hours of the morning. It is a very small target for my 550mm FL scope so has been drizzled x3. The widefield view also captures two other reasonably sized galaxies, NGC-5005 and the rather unusual irregular galaxy IC-4182.

I used 58 x 10-minute exposures with an L-Pro filter and added 4 x 30-minute dual narrow-band images using the Antlia ALP-T filter to add in some Ha colour to the galaxy.

Since the galaxies are of differing brightness, 3 copies of the image were stretched to optimise each of the galaxies, and again for the stars. The 4 resulting images were blended in Photoshop to bring each galaxy to a similar brightness.

I will add closer-up crops of the 3 galaxies.

The Waterbug Galaxy, NGC-5033, is a spiral galaxy somewhere in the range 40 to 60 million light years away. It is quite small, with an apparent size of 10x5 arc-minutes. Its bright centre is caused by extremely hot gases circulating around a central supermassive black hole. There is a weak interaction with its neighbour NGC-5005. The spirals at the 'front' of the galaxy appear somewhat irregular, giving the appearance of a copepod water 'bug'. Many other, more distant, galaxies are also visible in the vicinity, including NGC-5002, and NGC-5014.

NGC-5005 is a bright inclined spiral galaxy showing distinct dark dust lanes with apparent size of 5.8x2.9 arc-minutes.

IC-4182 is an odd shape, appearing to have 3 main arms, that are not quite forming a spiral. This galaxy produced a supernova observed in 1937. It is somewhere between 8 and 16 million light years away.

Final
Original
C

C

Title: Zoomed Galaxies

Description: Enlarged the galaxies

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5552359
PixInsight job	JZL8Q8AW6S92C53QEIIOHT88KHYUX1DZ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h10m26s.30
RA (top/left)	13h16m11s.51
RA (top/right)	13h12m10s.42
RA (bottom/right)	13h04m32s.67
RA (bottom/left)	13h08m46s.60

Dec (center)	+37°00′50″.1
Dec (top/left)	+36°09′12″.6
Dec (top/right)	+38°24′50″.2
Dec (bottom/right)	+37°51′25″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	+35°36′49″.4

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