Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  IC 4356  ·  NGC 5394  ·  NGC 5395
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ARP 84 - Tug of war in Canes Venatici, Jon Talbot
ARP 84 - Tug of war in Canes Venatici
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ARP 84 - Tug of war in Canes Venatici

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
ARP 84 - Tug of war in Canes Venatici, Jon Talbot
ARP 84 - Tug of war in Canes Venatici
Powered byPixInsight

ARP 84 - Tug of war in Canes Venatici

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Description

ARP84 is a set of peculiar galaxies which are interacting and are gravitationally distorted. NGC 5394 is the smaller of the two and is magnitude 12.1. It has been distorted into a S shape with a small core and long outer arms. NGC 5395 is the larger one and is magnitude 11.5. It has a almost typical spiral shape although one of the arms seems distorted towards NGC 5394. This galaxy pair is called ARP 84, for Halton "Chip" Arp who published a catalog called "Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies" in 1966. The two are also nicknamed "The Heron" for their shape as seen when rotated in a particular direction. The two lie 165 million light years distant in the constellation Canes Venatici. Astronomers believe these two galaxies collided once before and are still in a gravitational tug of war.

The image was taken using my 152mm Stellarvue SVX 152T refractor and ZWO ASI 6200 camera. The image was exposed using 2x2 binning and drizzled up to full resolution of .64 arc sec/pixel in post processing. The image above is a rotated crop of a small portion of the entire field of view. You can see the un-cropped full res field of view on my website. Within the full image you can see many many more faint PGC galaxies and many uncatalogued ones. I included an annotated image showing where these other galaxies are and their designations.

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