The Box Galaxies - Hickson 61

[petevasey]

This group of galaxies in Coma Berenices is made up of four relatively faint components.  Starting with the long blue one and moving clockwise they are 12.7 mag NGC 4173, 12.2 mag NGC 4169,  13.5 mag NGC 4174 and 13,4 mag NGC 4175.  What looks like a fuzzy red star near the right hand end of NGC 4174 is a tiny galaxy, PGC (LEDA) 213947.  NGC 4173 is not believed to be part of the group, just a chance alignment and nearer to us than the others.  The remaining easily seen galaxy towards the right edge is mag 15.1 UGC7190.  I got a small amount of data on the night of 10th April, but clouds soon moved in.  However last night (11th April) cleared nicely around 11.30 pm (BST) and stayed clear, and I was able to collect more data.  So this image consists of Luminance 13 x 10 minutes, RGB each 7 x 10 minutes all binned 2x2.  QSI 683 on RC10 with SX AO unit.  Despite the reasonable number of exposures, because of the faintness of the target quite a lot of noise appeared.  I know it's going to be clear again (!) tonight, but it's been such a lousy season that I want to move on to another target.   But the magic of digital processing has I believe given me a satisfactory result.

Cheers,

Peter

[CCD Imager]

Nice work Peter and good to see novel objects imaged. If the weather holds, I'll be looking at imaging a Hickson group.

Adrian