NGC 5005 (Caldwell 29, Herschel 289) is a type SAB(rs)bc spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici, which may be in the early stages of interacting with its more famous neighbor, NGC 5033.  Spanning only 5.8’ by 2.9’ and shining at an apparent visual magnitude of 9.8, this galaxy makes a challenging target for a 100 mm refractor. 

Due to the presence of nearby bright stars, there is a decision to be made about how to crop and frame this galaxy.  I cropped the image fairly closely to avoid having distracting stars positioned near the edges. 

This image is an LRGB composite taken over several nights, one of which was spent at a Bortle 2 dark site.  Because this galaxy is already near the meridian as astronomical darkness begins, I wasn’t even able to get two hours at the dark site, but every little bit helps.  Luminance frames were 300s and were shot in Mode3 (extended fullwell 2CMS, Gain 14, Offset 15).  RGB frames were 240s and were shot in Mode1 (high gain, Gain 56, Offset 10).

As with my recent small galaxy images, this one was drizzled 2x during stacking to obtain an image scale of 0.7” per pixel.  Starnet++ v2 was instrumental in separating stars from background objects so that the size of the stars could be reduced without perturbing the rest of the image. 

Another interesting note is that I finally gave in and bought an autofocuser (PegasusAstro FocusCube 2), which has helped tremendously with achieving lower FWHM in the subs.  Of course, the seeing was average or below average on all of the nights during which this image was recorded, so the autofocuser didn’t help as much as it could have!  It is worth noting that I needed to install the most recent “beta” version of N.I.N.A. to get the autofocuser to work properly.  Once I got around driver issues, it was smooth sailing.

The object denoted IC 4211 by the plate solver is, interestingly enough, just a star.  Why did it get an IC designation?