Image taken on the night of 28 February 2023. The sub-exposures have been limited to 180s to limit pixel saturation of the Canon 77D camera, that has a pretty limited full well and a high pedestal when operation at 1600 ISO. Drizzle 2x2 has been used to compensate the configuration under-sampling.
The mouse hovering "multi-point magnification" technique has been inspired by the works of
@Gary Imm that, as far as I know, invented it.
M96 GroupThe M96 Group (also known as the Leo I Group) is a group of galaxies located some 30-35 Million light years away, in the constellation Leo, including between 8 and 24 galaxies and the Leo Ring. The group is one of many groups that lies within the Virgo Supercluster. This is the nearest group to the Local Group to combine bright spirals and a bright elliptical galaxy like Messier 105.
The main objects of the group are
M95 (distance = 33Mly, Type= SB(r)b),
M96 (31Mly, SAB(rs)ab),
M105 (36Mly, E1),
NGC3384 (35Mly, SB(s)0),
the Leo Ring H I region, and, outside the picture, NGC3299 (SAB(s)dm), NGC3377 (E5.5), NGC3412 (SB(s)0), NGC 3489 (SAB(rs)0).
The Leo RingThe Leo Ring is an immense intergalactic cloud of hydrogen and helium gas some 650 kilolight-years (200 kpc) in diameter, in orbit around M96 and NGC3384, and visible in the radio spectrum.
Radio astronomers discovered the cloud in 1983, and theorized initially that the ring was primordial gas in the process of forming a galaxy. In 2010, it was suggested that the gas was instead the result of a galactic collision between NGC 3384 and M96 with which the ring is closely associated.
It has been suggested that 1.2 billion years ago the two galaxies collided, expelling a galaxy's worth of gas into intergalactic space. This gas gathered into a vast set of clouds, the Leo Ring.
The ring is now 650 kilolight-years (200 kpc) wide. The ring is composed of a collection of H I regions. A bridge of gas connects the ring to M96, see picture below.
NGC3389NGC3389, located in the image close to M105, is not part of the M96 group. Instead it is part of the NGC3338 Group. It lies some 54 Million light years away.
Info above has been elaborated starting from different Wikipedia entries.
Picture: Leo Ring surrounding M105 & NGC 3384 - NASA/JPL-Caltech/DSS - Galex
Comments