This is NGC 5907, the Splinter Galaxy or Knife Edge Galaxy.
Data (
Wikipedia)
Constellation: Draco
Right ascension: 15h 15m 53s
Declination: +56° 19′ 40″
Redshift: 0.002225
Helio radial velocity: 667 ± 3 km/s
Distance: 53.5 ± 8.1 Mly
16.4 ± 2.5 Mpc
Apparent magnitude (V): 11.1
Type: Sb+
Apparent size (V): 12.7' x 1.4'
Other Data Estimates45 Mly, 10.4 Mag, 12.6' x 1.4' Size (
Concise Catalog of Deep-Sky Objects, W.H. Finley)
34 Mly, 10.3 Mag, 11' x 1.3' Size (
SkyAtlas 2000.0 Companion, Strong and Sinnott)
This is a warped spiral seen almost edge-on. Not seen in my image are two faint dust lanes that loop around the galaxy. These are remnants of past interactions with other galaxies.
The L channel is an integration of several different sessions throughout July, 2017. I had deemed much of the data to be subpar, but using the latest process tools in PixInsight I was able to integrate a fairly decent image. I took only minimal color data, less than an hour integration on each channel, but wanted to process in LRGB anyway. All in all it's pretty good, and I look forward to returning to it again in the future.
In order to rescue more subframes than usual, I took herculean steps to crop, rotate and apply AutomaticBackgroundExtraction each registered subframe prior to grading them with SubframeSelector. Using the best frame, I then ran LocalNormalization and generated normalized files. These were then weighted in SubframeSelector and saved with weight FITS header keyword values for integration. These were registered again to generate drizzle files, and finally these files were integrated. I had used my usual less convoluted workflow, but due to the subpar frames, the results were very noisy and confusing, particularly with enhanced background. The long method described got me at least to what you see here.
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