While exploring Bootes one night recently, I came across this lovely galaxy field around the bright 6th magnitude red giant HR 5677. This star is very orange, with a color index of 1.62, and a giant spectral class M2III, making it similar to Arcturus. Its surrounded by variety of spirals small and tiny, with showing the classic spiral features such as sweeping arms, faint outer halos, dark dust lanes and intense HII star forming regions and O-B associations.

The largest and brightest of the galaxies in the field are NGC 5899 (11.7 magnitude) and 5900 (14.7 magnitude), at 140 and 180 million light years, respectively. They are separated far enough apart that they probably aren't within the same galaxy group. The smaller pair of galaxies at the upper right, NGC 5893 and 5895 are both 270 million light years away, so probably form a gravitationally bound pair. The tiniest of the NGC galaxies in the field is the little face on spiral NGC 5896 (at upper right center), which is much farther away at 970 million light years and the faintest at magnitude 15.4. Several very distant galaxy clusters can also be seen in the background, most of them 2.5 billion light years out and beyond.

That little reddish-yellow "satellite" galaxy of NGC 5899 is actually a much more distant unrelated elliptical galaxy, PGC/LEDA 2190838. Its about 2 billion light years away. The very yellow color is a clue that its quite fareaway.



That edge on spiral in the glare of HR5677 has no designation or data that I can find, probably because its too close to a bright star. Judging by its size, its clearly quite far away, probably more than a billion light years distant. There are several other galaxies of similar size, but more irregularly shaped, trying to hide in the star glare as well.

Just below NGC 5896 is 19th quasar SDSS J151353.14+420106.5, which has the pale blue color commonly seen in quasars. As quasar's go, its fairly "close", with a redshift of only z=0.71802 which puts it at about 6.9 billion light years. Most quasars are over 8 billion light years away.

Each of the 6 image 8 minute images that were stacked to create this image were each themselves 240 live-stacked (in SharpCap) two second exposures.