Messier 60 and friend

[petevasey]

Yet another clear night on 14th April.  Making up for time lost this season and not to be wasted, but relatively short periods of darkness late at night. Sleep deprivation looming large!

Elliptical galaxies are generally pretty nondescript objects to image, although of course they are amazing things usually containing billions of stars and a huge black hole, believed generally to be the result of galaxy mergers.  Messier 60 (NGC4649) is a large magnitude 8.8 elliptical galaxy in Virgo, and this is the first time I've imaged it - I'd overlooked it as a run of the mill elliptical.  But when I saw a Hubble image I realised that it has an interesting neighbour, magnitude 11.4 spiral galaxy NGC 4647.  It's not certain whether the two are interacting, or the spiral is further away from us, but they make an interesting pair.  The edge on galaxy in the bottom right corner is mag 11.1 NGC 4638.  QSI 683 with SX AO unit on RC10.  Luminance 12 x 10 minutes, RGB each 6 x 10 minutes all binned 2x2.

Cheers,

Peter