When
@Niall MacNeill made me aware of this bright, 20 arc-minute wide galaxy I jumped on it. Galaxies this big are not common and I really like the detail you can see while processing them. Seen close to edge-on, this resembles NGC 253 a lot to me in that we don't immediately see arms and there is quite a bit of dust seeming to float up and away from the disc. The galaxy itself is not super colorful. What you see here is with saturation pushed quite hard and with Ha added. It just doesn't look really active to me despite it containing an " unusual energetic
Seyfert 2 nucleus" according to Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_4945Above and to the right of the galaxy core is a nice, tiny face-on spiral. I looked it up in Aladin and it is
LEDA 3097829. Not much info on it. Red shift lists as
z(~) 4.07E-04 [~]Coordinates are 13 04 52.85, -49 24 18.6
The bright star Xi Centauri insists on being part of the composition. I considered cropping it out to get a bit closer to the details of the galaxy but the diffraction spike intrudes on the galaxy. In the end, I think it makes for a more interesting image.
In Chile we have entered the worst month in terms of clouds and that is accompanied by poor seeing, at least by Atacama standards. I cut off my subs at 2.00" here and still have been trashing up to 85% of the subs nightly. As such I decided to go with less data than I normally would get. The brightness of this magnitude 9.3 galaxy makes that feasible.
Comments