The NGC 3190 galaxy cluster or the Leo Quartet is quite popular for astrophotographers in the Northern Hemisphere.  The group consists of four gravitational bound galaxies about 70 million light-years away in constellation Leo. Other names include the Hickson 44 named after Canadian astronomer Paul Hickson and Arp 316.  One of the reasons this group is so cool is that it contains various galaxy types, including spiral, elliptical, barred, and distorted.  NGC 3190 is the spiral edge-on galaxy with the thick distinctive dust lane(s) - this was one of my favorite parts of the image.  Oddly it is also labeled NGC 3189 and was having some difficulty finding a reason why doing regular searches until I went to Gary Imm`s Astrobin where he discovered it was originally thought to be two objects.  

The heavily distorted NGC 3187, is an S-shaped spiral galaxy, located just right of NGC 3190.  Interactions with nearby galaxies were responsible for the distortion and may have led to the formation of bright blue star clusters throughout the galaxy giving it its bluish tint.  NGC 3193 the large fuzzy elliptical galaxy with a yellow tint located above and to the left of NGC 3190.  A very colorful well structured spiral galaxy, NGC 3185, is located on the bottom central portion of the image.  The outer arms look detached from the central core but I believe that is an illusion.  Numerous small galaxies can be found if you look carefully. 

I left the two very large stars on the top in my image for some reason - I like them! HIP 50444 is the magnitude 7.65 (7.79 absolute) yellow star in the top center while HIP 50364 is the magnitude 7.60 (3.33 absolute) blue star on the right. My stars do look a bit wonky and unfortunately my next image taken with my Edge800 will also have this issue. I thought it was because I put the new Celestron Dew Ring in place of the normal holder ring wrong somehow because I started getting the intermittent star shape/streaks right after replacing it even though guiding was good. Turns out after re-attaching it and doing other stuff I finally diagnosed what the problem was. The Atlas Pro mount has a weird pressure plate attachment when using it with the 8-inch extender which can come loose every so often. It was not until several nights after that I realized this was the problem - oh well. I won't make this mistake again, hopefully.  I last imaged this over three years ago and needless to say, a great improvement! 

Dates: 3-22, 3-29, 4-29, 4-30

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