Focal Pointe Observatory
Astrophotography by Bob Franke

Home
Recent Images
Galaxies
Nebulae
   Natural Color
   Narrow Band
   H-Alpha
Clusters
Comets
Solar System
Observatory
Equipment
My Freeware
Tips & Tricks
Published Images
Local Weather
Terrestrial

 

Send Email

 

 

 

 

 

 

NGC 5395 & 5394 (Arp 84)


           Click the full screen zoom button       ^
     
Click the image to Zoom and Pan    

Click here to view the image without Zoomify (2100 x 1400)

 

Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) 0.64 arcsec / pixel.  Zoomify image scale is 0.64 to 1.79 arcsec / pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

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

Acquisition Data

5/16/2010 to 6/6/2010 Chino Valley, AZ... with CCDAutoPilot3 & CCDSoft,  AOL guided

Exposure

Lum (no filter)  330 min (22 x 15 min, bin 1x1)

RGB                270 min ( 6 x 15 min each, bin 2x2)

Software

  • CCDSoft, CCDStack, Photoshop CS w/ the Fits Liberator plugin. Noel Carboni's actions and Russell Croman's GradientXTerminator.

  • Color calibration by MBG (my best guess), there were no useable stars for eXcalibrator.

  • PixFix32 (pre-beta) to repair hot/cold pixels and column defects.

  • CCDStack to calibrate, register, normalize, data reject, combine the sub exposures, LRGB color, and luminance deconvolution.

  • PhotoShop for LLRGB combine &  on-linear stretching.

Comment

North is to top. 

NGC 5395 and 5394 , also known as Arp 84, are two interacting galaxies in the constellation Canes Venatici. The larger, NGC 5395, is at a distance 165 million light-years and NGC 5394 is 162 million light-years away. NGC 5394 is thought to have cart wheeled through NGC 5395, instead of a grazing encounter.

The larger elliptical galaxy, to the upper left of NGC 5394, is IC 4356. At a distance of about 675 million light-years, IC 4356 is a member of the Virgo I galaxy group.

Arp 84 is also known as the Heron Galaxy. It takes little imagination to see a blue heron's body, complete with neck, head and a beak reaching out to a nearby fish. Also seen in the image, are more than 1000 background galaxies... as faint as magnitude 23.2.