Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Virgo (Vir)  ·  Contains:  HD121605  ·  NGC 5348  ·  NGC 5356  ·  NGC 5360  ·  NGC 5363  ·  NGC 5364  ·  NGC 5373
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NGC5363 galaxy group, Andreas Zeinert
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NGC5363 galaxy group

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC5363 galaxy group, Andreas Zeinert
Powered byPixInsight

NGC5363 galaxy group

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Description

NGC5363 is the lenticular galaxy in the lower part of the image, about 63 m lys from us. It is characterized by the presence of dust lanes. There is evidence that NGC 5363 accreted another galaxy, and thus it is strongly suggested that the interstellar dust is of external origin. In the centre of NGC 5363 lies a supermassive black hole with an estimated mass of 375 million solar masses.... The NGC 5363 group include NGC 5300, NGC 5348, NGC 5356, NGC 5360, and NGC 5364, some of them are visible in the picture. The spiral galaxy NGC 5364 seems not to be in gravitational interaction with NGC 5363, it is about 54 mly away. (Information source Wikipedia)

A nice galaxy group but unfortunately taken under bad seeing conditions. RMS in PhD guiding was about 1" while I am used to values around 0.4-0.6". Therefore I reduced the scale to 64%. To my disappointment, data on NGC5364 were quite poor. 3h30 at f/7 is not enough although the subs seemed to have enough signal. However I am happy that the dust lines came out in NGC 5363. This was possible with  HDRTransform tool in PI. One real challenge is the high dynamic range between these galaxies. I was also puzzled by NGC5348 which looks like there is a bite from a cosmic monster but this is again a consequence of dust in this galaxy and therefore real.

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NGC5363 galaxy group, Andreas Zeinert