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ngc 4631, astroeyes

ngc 4631

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Acquisition details

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Description

From 2006.

I thought you might be interested to see my image of ngc 4631, the 'Whale' Galaxy in CVn. The 'Whale' is a huge edge-on type Sc spiral galaxy and it is interacting with it's companion galaxy ngc 4627 visible at the top of my image. The pair together are known as ARP 281. As they are close to us, 25-30 million light years, they are quite bright, ngc 4631 is mag. 9.5 and ngc 4627 is mag. 12.9.

Just out of the frame is the highly distorted galaxy ngc 4656 which is interacting with 4631 and will be the subject of investigation next clear night.

I took this shot last week when the sky cleared for a couple of hours. Time I'd got the telescope set up, the camera cooled down and all the software procedures, like finding, centreing and focussing sorted out, the clouds began rolling in and I only managed to get about 25 minutes exposure and most of that was through increasing cloud. All very frustrating.

Still here's the 'Whale' for what it's worth.

Acquired through my 10" f/4.8 newtonian and SX MX5-C camera using Astroart for acquisition and processing. 25 minutes total integration.

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ngc 4631, astroeyes