After a few false starts, I managed to get a night of data, and around the new moon. April offers the last dark skies before summer encroaches in the northern hemisphere.
Leo is at its zenith by the time it gets dark, and inspired by
@Jay Sanchezimage of this galaxy ‘group’ decided to give it a go. I lost some data to dew collecting on my corrector plate, and pulled in just over 3.5 hours in the end - just sufficient to show some detail and colour. My Altair hypercam OSC with 2.4 micron pixels tends to oversample at longer focal lengths - I may try cropping and binning.
I’ve kept the background fairly light to show some of the subtle star streams around NGC 3185 and NGC 3189/90 (a curious duplicate). NGC 3187 has extraordinary outer arms, perpendicular to the spiral disk - these are dotted with blue star streams (only a hint in my image), but well shown in
@James R Pottsrecent image. I see a few dim background galaxies, but these may just be wonky stars /processing artifacts.
Considered a true group by Paul Hickson, Halton Arp, and other eminent astronomers, our own resident expert
@Gary Imm questions this as a line of sight phenomenon, in a
recent fine image, quoting distances of 80-115m LY.
Thanks all for the inspiration to give this a go.
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