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NGC 4731 | Virgo Cluster of Galaxies | LHaRGB

Barred spiral galaxy NGC 4731 lies some 65 million light-years away in the large Virgo cluster of galaxies, not too far away from the more famous M104 Sombrero galaxy. Its broad spiral arms are distorted by gravitational interaction with a fellow Virgo cluster member, a giant elliptical galaxy called NGC 4697 [which is outside of the field of view]. NGC 4731 is well over 100,000 light-years across [but only 6.6´ X 4.2´ in apparent size, with a visual magnitude: 11.5], with a smaller deformed neighbour to the top right called NGC 4731A.

 

The galaxy itself has a few star forming regions denoted by the small pink hotspots, with a mottled surrounding background coloured by possibly thousands of tiny galaxies perhaps hundreds of times more distant.

 

This area was definitely a challenge to complete. Thank you for having a look.

 

Bye! 😊

 

This cropped frame represents only 40% of my cameras full field of view.

 

Full Resolution link:

farm8.staticflickr.com/7836/47445930051_fd3c5ee13f_o.jpg

 

Information about the image:

 

Instrument: Planewave CDK 12.5 | Focal Ratio: F8

Camera: STXL-11000 + AOX | Mount: AP900GTO

Camera Sensitivity: Lum: BIN 1x1, Ha: BIN 1x1, RGB: BIN 2x2

Exposure Details: Total: hours 29.75 | Lum: 71 x 900 sec [17.75hr], Ha: 9 x 1200 sec [3.0hr],RGB 24 x 450sec each [9.0hrs]

Viewing Location: Central Victoria, Australia.

Observatory: ScopeDome 3m

Date: January 2018 to March 2019

Software Enhancements: CCDStack2, CCDBand-Aid, PS, Pixinsight

Comment: For some reason this large data set was consistently not so great in quality; something like average or less quality seeing? Even after so many hours of sub-exposures, the data wasn’t robust and became quite noisy.

Author: Steven Mohr

 

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Uploaded on March 23, 2019