Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Coma Berenices (Com)  ·  Contains:  6 Com  ·  Coma Pinwheel  ·  IC 3061  ·  IC 3065  ·  IC 3077  ·  IC 3080  ·  IC 3093  ·  IC 3096  ·  IC 3142  ·  IC 781  ·  M 99  ·  NGC 4208  ·  NGC 4212  ·  NGC 4254  ·  NGC 4262  ·  NGC 4298  ·  NGC 4302  ·  PGC 1440475  ·  PGC 1441312  ·  PGC 1441316  ·  PGC 1441528  ·  PGC 1441622  ·  PGC 1441916  ·  PGC 1442145  ·  PGC 1442412  ·  PGC 1443279  ·  PGC 1443864  ·  PGC 1443965  ·  PGC 1444270  ·  PGC 1444951  ·  And 115 more.
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M99 and Friends, Molly Wakeling
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M99 and Friends

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M99 and Friends, Molly Wakeling
Powered byPixInsight

M99 and Friends

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Description

This region of the sky in the Coma Berenices constellation is lush with galaxies! You can see just how many in the annotated image...and that's just what my 4" refractor could pick up from outside San Francisco!

M99 is part of the Virgo Cluster of galaixes, and lies about 49 million lightyears away from our own galaxy. It's a "grand design" spiral galaxy with loosely wound arms. As it moves further into the Virgo Cluster, much of its interstellar gas and dust is being swept away by contact with the intracluster medium -- the gas and dust between galaxies that exists in galaxy clusters.

Over on the left-hand side are two galaxies NGC 4302 and NGC 4298. They not only appear close together, they are indeed close together -- a tidal bridge connects the two, and both exhibit rapid star formation, which occurs when galaxies are gravitationally interacting with each other.

All around the rest of the image are dozens of other galaxies at even greater distances. I looked up some of the dimmer PGC galaxies in NASA's NED database, and some had distances of 8 billion (B!) lightyears, and some don't have distances measured at all!

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M99 and Friends, Molly Wakeling