NGC5566 and friends

[petevasey]

Hi, guys,

I seem to have a perverse death wish at times! I see a marvellous image such as this one which was imaged with a 14.5" telescope 4000 feet above sea level in an Arizona dark sky park, and attempt to capture similar quality with a 10" telescope from my home observatory 680 feet up in North East England under semi rural skies. Well, I can't match it of course.  That site is well worth a browse - many superb images there!

This beautiful group of galaxies is in Virgo. The largest is NGC5566 (Arp 286, mag 10.7), NGC5569 (mag 13.7) above it and NGC 5560 (mag 12.4) to the right. The much smaller galaxy looking like a fuzzy star towards the left of the image is 16th magnitude PGC 51269. Twilight nights are rapidly approaching, but after a very poor 2019-2020 season I resolved to have a go at this, even though full dark hours are now limited and quite long exposures were required for these fairly faint galaxies.

First attempt on 22nd April was partly spoiled by high haze earlier on in the sequence leading to high background levels and the loss of 8 frames (2 hours worth!). Fortunately last night (25th April) was kinder and I captured enough extra subs to produce a reasonable image. Unfortunately seeing was rather poor on both nights, so the finest detail is lost. Can't win them all! QSI 683 on RC10 with SX AO unit. Luminance 11 by 15 minutes, RGB each 4 x 15 minutes all binned 2x2

Cheers and keep well

Peter

Edited April 26, 2020 by petevasey

[Davey-T]

Nicely captured Peter, reminded me I took some subs of those last year, must try to gather more.

Dave

[petevasey]

Thanks, Dave, full size image is on my web site here.