This a lovely type SAcd face-oon spiral galaxy that anchors a group of much smaller galaxies that surround it all at distance of about 100 million light years. The most prominent of these satellite galaxies is teardrop shaped irregular galaxy MCG+08-26-038, which has two very bright blue O-B star associations as well as numerous fainter ones across its surface mixed in with some pink HII regions. The big galaxy is likewise full of these star forming regions that mix blue of O-B associaitons with the reddish hues of O-B associations to produce many pale magenta/pink and white knots.

I took a deep dive, exploring field for interesting objects in the SIMBAD and SDSS databases. Revision B shows the annotated version. Seven quasars (QSOs) show up in the field, including one undergoing a outburst making it at least a magnitude brighter than normal. These QSO range from very pale blue to quite intensely blue in this image. There is also an AGN that is essentially just a more nearby QSO. Also interesting to note is two galaxy groups essentially superimposed on one another, one with NGC 5660 as its anchor at around redshift z=.0076 (about 100 million light years away) and the other a large group of much more distant galaxies at a redshift of z=.072 (about 970 million light years away). All the more distant tiny galaxies with distinct nuclei (making them likely to be spirals) are in this more distant group. So there seems to be a roughly 800 million light year void between the nearer and farther group with very few bright galaxies.

In addition, I noticed an M5V red dwarf (about 14% the mass of our sun) that barely shows up as a red smudge. The IR/Cut filter lopped off most of its light, which peaks in the near-infrared. No filter would have shown it better, but the color of other stars would not show as well.

The 10 images that were stacked to produce this image were each an 8 minute live stack produced in SharpCap which were composed of 240 two second exposures.