NGC 404 hides in the glare of Beta Andromedae, aka Mirach, and thus its nickname of Mirach's Ghost. Its a dwarf SA0 lenticular galaxy with a hint of structure near the center where star formation is still active, pointing to its past as a spiral galaxy. Its only 3.24 megaparsecs away, so is considered a distant member of our own local group of galaxies, beyond the Andromeda Galaxy. I measure it at a bit under 6 arc minutes across (which matches measurements available online), putting its size at a fairly small 16,000 light years or about double the size of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Be sure to check out both version A and B of the image, see details below.

The seeing wasn't good enough one evening back in August for bin 1 work, so I thought I would try capturing an image of this galaxy, as doesn't have a lot of fine detail to capture. As seen in version "A" glare of Mirach significantly obscures the galaxy, and my optics are a little dirty too, so that didn't help either! I tried three rounds of modeling the star glare until finally coming up with one which I could use to almost completely subtract out the star glare - see version "B" for this. This revealed more of the extend of the galaxy as well as some distant background galaxy clusters that were mostly lost in the glare. There is a little bit of color distortion on either side of the galaxy, one showing a blue tint and a red tint on the opposite side. This is just an residual artifact of the glare subtraction.

Not sure which version to mark as "Final", since they together tell the story of this object. For some reason, rev B shows NGC 404 and Mirach, but also shows NGC 7293 peeking into the field! Strange. Maybe something to do with glare subtraction confused it?

Each of the 6 minute images stacked for this image was a live-stack of 320 x 1.5 second subs. Live-stacking was performed with SharpCap.