Whale and the Hockey Stick (Jeff Reitzel)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: NGC 4627 · NGC 4631 · NGC 4656 · NGC 4657 · Whale Galaxy

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Whale and the Hockey Stick

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Whale and the Hockey Stick

This beautiful pair of galaxies is found in the Constellation Canes Venatici nearly 30 million light years from Earth. Both galaxies are large spirals warped by gravitational interaction with each other. Ha is added to this image to highlight some of the activity triggered by these forces.
The brighter Whale Galaxy (NGC4631) is known for it's distinctive shape and has a small dwarf companion just above it. It is listed in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as a rare double galaxy.
The smaller Hockey Stick (NGC 4656) is also known as the Crowbar Galaxy due to it's shape. Just above it is a faint fuzzy cloud that may well be the remnants of a small galaxy merging with it.

This is a drizzled integration using my larger refractor as it was configured working on other projects during my dark sky trip last week. I needed something to fill the early morning hours and not waste valuable imaging time. Ha was added using a continuum subtraction method with Pixinsight.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9275049
PixInsight job	30TAYJINBUSDR7LEPZ093XAFV5UBVM10
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h43m06s.313
RA (top/left)	12h45m21s.454
RA (top/right)	12h40m50s.561
RA (bottom/right)	12h40m52s.350
RA (bottom/left)	12h45m20s.727

Dec (center)	+32°19′44″.88
Dec (top/left)	+32°43′53″.40
Dec (top/right)	+32°43′45″.46
Dec (bottom/right)	+31°55′26″.42
Dec (bottom/left)	+31°55′34″.30

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Whale and the Hockey Stick

Whale and the Hockey Stick

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Whale and the Hockey Stick

Whale and the Hockey Stick

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