Another widefield in the spring time sky featuring some interesting objects:

In between the Coma Berenices galaxy cluster on the left and NGC4725 on the right is a faint but fairly large planetary nebula named LoTr 5. Planetaries this close to the direction of the galactic pole are rather rare. It is 1650 LY away and some 1.8 LY wide which would display it still reasonably in a field of 4° width. So I wanted to give that a try.

The binary structure with its double-bubble or peanut shaped outline is already clearly to see, even structures inside this faint fuzzy show up already. There is a pretty interesting article on LoTr 5 in Wikipedia you may want to explore additionally ;-)

There is more interesting stuff, in the middle the small triangle shaped something is an irregular dwarf galaxy only 14 million LY from here. Its irregular shape could originate from interacting with our Milkyway. Its magnitude is said to be +14.0. Nevertheless it is remarkably blue and bright. Its better name is actually DDO 154 as NGC4789A suggests a proximity to NGC4789 which is not the case at all.

Another interesting object is NGC4747, yet another irregular galaxy with a strong tidal distortion forming a nice pair with NGC4725. Both are relatively close together at distances from 50 to 54 million LY from here which may be the cause for the tidal distortion of NGC4747. A third and rather small galaxy is joining the pair, NGC4712, but only visually. In real life it is 240 million LY further away. At the same distance it would appear 5 times larger!

I spent 3 nights on this object under horrible conditions, with winds good enough for windsurfing fun and, a lot of dust in the air from a nearby dusty road, airborne by wind gusts. I had 360mins of light, I could use poor 210mins in the end, due to wind-eggy stars, puffed-up stars from dust and such. The remaining images which I had declared to be useable still gave me a hard time on the backround... but, it was the first couple of clear nights after a long period of sh_tweather, so, there was the neeeed to go outside! It had to be! ;-)

This is what I could save of it in a first attempt ;-)