NGC4490/4485 - another peculiar galaxy pair caught with my big blue scope

[gorann]

This is what Wiki writes about this object: NGC 4490, also known as the Cocoon Galaxy, is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venetici. It lies at a distance of 25 million ly from Earth. It interacts with its smaller companion NGC4485 and as a result is a starbust galaxy. NGC 4490 and NGC 4485 are collectively known in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 269.

Caught over two recent nights with my Meade 14" LX200R (f/10 so FL 3550 mm) and Sony A7s (run at full frame and ISO3200) on the EQ8 (Lodestar X2 and ZWO OAG). 153 x 3minutes = 7.65 hours with a bit of moon around.

PS. I have to tell you a bit about the scope I used for this and some other recent images. About a year ago I by chance saw an advertisement on the general buy&sell site in Norway for a 14" f/10 Meade LX200R OTA and the seller was only a few minutes away from my house. LX200R ("R" for Ritchey-Chretien) is the original name for what Meade after losing a court case had to rename "ACF". I found the price quite reasonable (about 2500 Euro) for such a big scope but from what I had read about astrophotography, imaging with a 3.55 metre focal length scope like this one is extremely challenging and bound to be a big disappointment. My main interest is imaging, but I still could not resist having a look at it, and after seeing that big and dusty (only on the outside) scope tucked away in an attic, I was sold and I just had to buy it. I brought it across the border to my weekend house (once a small farm) in Sweden where light pollution is absent and where I had built my obsy. I soon realized that it would not fit under my obsy roof, and as it weighed 40+ kg, occasionally exchanging it for my refractors was not an option. So I decided to build a second obsy where I could put it on my old EQ8, that had been retired and was tucked away in my garage after I got my Mesu200 mount. My thought was to use it visually and in any case I did not have any camera with big enough pixels to match the focal length of a 14" SCT. When the obsy was built, and the big SCT was sitting there on the EQ8, I could not resist trying to do some imaging, and to my surprise, the old EQ8 and the big scope worked very well together. I have never had eggy stars with this set up and as long as seeing is relatively good, I get quite decent guiding, often around 0.4 "/pixel. So now I have also invested in a dedicated camera for the big SCT: a Sony A7s, a full frame APS camera with 8.4 µm pixels that I found on ebay and had JTW in Holland to full-spectrum modify. Now the new surprise was that the SCT fills essentially the whole 24 x 36 mm frame (only darkened at the very end of the corners) with nice round stars - and not very bloated stars as often seen with STCs. So this bargain scope made in the early years of this century in the US (before Meade was bought up and moved manufacturing to Mexico and then China) is now my prime galaxy hunter, and I like her more and more!

Edited April 2, 2020 by gorann

[celestron8g8]

Nice captures ! 

[gorann]

5 minutes ago, celestron8g8 said:

Nice captures ! 

Thanks a lot Ron!

[SamAndrew]

Scope sounds great; lovely image.

[Whistlin Bob]

Lovely capture of an interesting object. The scope sounds amazing!

[gorann]

21 hours ago, SamAndrew said:

Scope sounds great; lovely image.

 

21 hours ago, Whistlin Bob said:

Lovely capture of an interesting object. The scope sounds amazing!

Thank you both!

[gorann]

Reworked the image since there were clearly more dust and details to be teased out of the data, and what else to do when the moon is out in full force......

 

Edited April 7, 2020 by gorann

[MarkAR]

Definitely picked up on more of the outlying dust halo. Nice one.

[tooth_dr]

Stunning. I enjoyed reading all about the scope. Your love for it is evident. I found myself wanting one just from reading the enjoyment you have gotten from it. 

[Erling G-P]

21 minutes ago, tooth_dr said:

Stunning. I enjoyed reading all about the scope. Your love for it is evident. I found myself wanting one just from reading the enjoyment you have gotten from it. 

That makes two!    And a fantastic image for sure!!

[gorann]

8 hours ago, MarkAR said:

Definitely picked up on more of the outlying dust halo. Nice one.

Thanks a lot Mark! It just struck me that we call dust is most likely stars with planets.

[gorann]

8 hours ago, tooth_dr said:

Stunning. I enjoyed reading all about the scope. Your love for it is evident. I found myself wanting one just from reading the enjoyment you have gotten from it. 

 

8 hours ago, Erling G-P said:

That makes two!    And a fantastic image for sure!!

Thanks a lot Adam and Erling!

Here she is: