June 2015 - Picture of the Month
Three Galaxies in the Constellation of Coma Berenices
Image Courtesy of David Davies, Cambridge, UK. Please click on the image for the high resolution version.
For more images from David please visit his Flickr Photostream.
Here is a target from Ruben Kier's book The 100 Best Astrophotography Targets
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This is NGC 4725, AKA "The Ringed Galaxy" or "The One-armed Spiral Galaxy" in Coma Berenices. Also in this image is NGC 4747 (top left) which is interacting with NGC 4725. To the right we can see magnitude 13.5 NGC 4712. NGC 4725 is about the same size as the Milky Way and about 41 million light years distant.
One of my aims in imaging this galaxy was to capture the faint outer halo of NGC 4725 and also to see if I could image any of the disrupted tails from NGC 4747. Scanning this image reveals many small faint galaxies.
This image comprises 12 x 10 minutes of luminance, binned 1 x 1 and 5 x 5 minutes each of RGB binned 2 x 2 captured with a F/4 Newtonian and QSI 583 camera with a Lodestar as off-axis guide camera.
Image capture was with Nebulosity V4; calibration and stacking with Deep Sky Stacker and processing with Pixinsight and Photoshop. This is a crop of the original image.
David Davies (22 May 2015).
