NGC4561 - The Wineglass Galaxy!

[lukebl]

Hi folks,

This is something I've been working on a for a few weeks, what with there being almost no clear skies here in Eastern England. It is the result of over 25 hours of captures.

It's NGC 4651, Arp189, part of the Virgo cluster and in Coma Berenices, generally apparently called the Umbrella Galaxy, but I much prefer to call it the 'Wineglass Galaxy' or maybe even the 'Tie Fighter' galaxy to keep in with the Star Wars theme!. I stumbled across it whilst browsing APOD. It's a truly remarkable and beautiful object with some incredibly faint features, which my 25 hours of captures have only just managed to pull out.

Apparently it's about the size of our Milky Way, with a faint umbrella-shaped structure that seems to extend some 100 thousand light-years beyond the bright galactic disk. The giant cosmic umbrella is now known to be composed of tidal star streams - extensive trails of stars gravitationally stripped from a smaller satellite galaxy. The small galaxy was eventually torn apart in repeated encounters as it swept back and forth on eccentric orbits through NGC 4651.

269 x 5 & 6 minute exposures, Atik 428ex, 200mm f/5 Newtonian. Colour was captured with a Canon 700d, 40 x 3 minute exposures. Stacked in DSS and processed in Photoshop. Field of view 23.4 x 29.8 arcmin.

The galaxy core itself is quite bright at magnitude 11 and visible in half-second exposures, but the faint jets of stars only appeared after much stacking and stretching. There's also a quasar in the background, 3C 275.1.