Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Virgo (Vir)  ·  Contains:  NGC 5037  ·  NGC 5047  ·  NGC 5049  ·  NGC 5054
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NGC 5054 -- Interacting Galaxies, Terry Robison
NGC 5054 -- Interacting Galaxies
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NGC 5054 -- Interacting Galaxies

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 5054 -- Interacting Galaxies, Terry Robison
NGC 5054 -- Interacting Galaxies
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 5054 -- Interacting Galaxies

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Description

This beautiful and colourful spiral galaxy can be found in the constellation of Virgo. With a 6 inch telescope, you should observe a faint glow. With a larger scope in the 16 to 18 inch range, it will appear as an elongated structure with a mottled core.

The surface brightness allows a reasonable amount of detail and colour to come through, even with the modest sized instrument used to produce this image. This is amazing when you consider that the light from this galaxy has been travelling for 82 million years towards us. The dust lanes are quite evident, as are the star forming areas of the two major spiral arms. These are within the bluish regions of the arms. Its irregular shape suggests a possible interaction in the past. Near the lower right of NCG 5054, there is a faint edge on spiral galaxy magnitude 16. Its designation is MCG-3-34-40.

The image was constructed using separate luminance, red, green, and blue exposures. The have been aligned and stacked to reduce the noise, and increase signal for each channel / filter. Then they are combined into a colour image, assigning the resultant stacked images to their respective colour channel.

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