Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) 0.643 arcsec / pixel.  Shown resampled to 1.78 arcsec / pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ internal filter wheel, AstroDon G1 Filters

Acquisition Data

4/26/2009 to 5/25/2009  Chino Valley, AZ

Exposure

Lum    390 min (26 x 15 min, bin 1x1)

RGB    180 min (  4 x 15 min each, bin 1x1)

Software

CCDSoft, CCDStack, Photoshop CS w/ the Fits Liberator plugin, Noel Carboni's actions and Russ Croman's Gradient Exterminator

CCDStack to register, normalize, data reject & combine sub frames.

PhotoShop for the color combine, non-linear stretching and sharpening.

Comment

North is ~ to the top... the image is rotated 21 Deg's to the left.

Located in Coma Berenices, NGC 4302 is at a distance of about 54 million lights years with NGC 4298, on the right, at about 53 mil-yrs. With these two being so close together, it is surprising that there is not some visible tidal interaction. NGC 4302 is about the same diameter as our galaxy, at around 97,000 light years. The small spiral galaxy, to the left of NGC 4302, is PGC 169114 and is about 1,210 mil-yrs distant

The large galaxy in the upper left, at about 47 mil-yrs, is PGC 40066 with PGC 165108 to its lower left at a distance of 192 mil-yrs. Browsing around the larger wide field view reveals may more background galaxies and a few distant galaxy clusters..