Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cepheus (Cep)  ·  Contains:  NGC 2276  ·  NGC 2300  ·  PGC 20491  ·  PGC 20601  ·  PGC 20655  ·  PGC 20677  ·  PGC 2789997  ·  PGC 2790046  ·  PGC 2790096
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Arp 114 (NGC2300) and Arp25 (NGC2276), lowenthalm
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Arp 114 (NGC2300) and Arp25 (NGC2276)

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging
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Arp 114 (NGC2300) and Arp25 (NGC2276), lowenthalm
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Arp 114 (NGC2300) and Arp25 (NGC2276)

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

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Description

A very nice Arp catalog galaxy pairing. It was in a good spot up high and the seeing was pretty good on a couple nights at the end of February. Unfortunately, I was only able to get 48 minutes (which took about 1.5 hours to collect. Periods of worse seeing when frames were rejected during live-stacking, single frame tracking errors and tracking corrections, periodic refocusing as the temperature dropped and waiting for passing clouds to clear always slow things down when imaging at an image scale of half arc second per pixel where everything little thing becomes critical toward getting sharp images. The second night was had a lot of clouds early, so I got no more data and had to settle for 48 minutes worth. The result was pretty nice anyway, so I thought I would post it. I hope for another 48 minutes of data sometime in March under good seeing conditions, which should decrease image noise in the elliptical by quite a bit and improve the detail in the faint arms of the spiral. Each of the six 8 minute subs stacked to produce this image are composed of 240 two second exposures live-stacked in SharpCap.

The elliptical galaxy NGC 2300 (Arp114) is about 99 million light years light years away and although they look close together, the spiral galaxy NGC2276 (Arp25) is significantly farther away at about 120 million light years. This makes puts them at at least 21 million light years apart, almost double the distance between us and M81. I am unsure whether this pair of galaxies are considered to be in the same gravitationally bound group or not based on looking at galaxy group data on SIMBAD, some of which shows them in the same group and some not. My guess is they aren't though, since the cluster doesn't seem very dense and therefore massive.

The four brighter galaxies at the left edge of the image, from top to bottom are: UGC 3670 (type:?), UGC 3654 (type:?), UGC 3661 (type:spiral) and MCG+14-04-020 (aka LEDA/PGC 20491, type: spiral?). The little galaxy next to the MCG_14_04_020 is LEDA/PGC 2790096. To the upper left of the big elliptical is tiny little LEDA/PGC 2789997 and the at the far right between two stars is LEDA/PGC 2790046, which appears to be a spiral. Numerous other fainter galaxies can be seen throughout. Where I could find distances to these brighter galaxies, they seem to fall at either the distance of NGC2300 or at the distance of NGC 2276, again suggesting to me that these are two superimposed galaxy groupings.

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