May 2015 - Picture of the Month
Hickson 44 in the Constellation of Leo
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.
This is my first observation of the Hickson 44 group of interacting galaxies in Leo some 80 million light years away.
The group comprises NGC3190 (incorporating NGC 3189) in the centre; NGC 3187, a heavily distorted galaxy to the right; NGC 3185, a barred spiral galaxy to the bottom and the big elliptical galaxy NGC 3193 to the upper left. Many other fainter galaxies are visible in this image.
I captured the data for this image on the nights of 10th and 14th April 2015. The exposures were restricted to 5 minutes each to prevent the brightest stars (magnitude 7.6) saturating. The image comprises 28 luminance subs to try and capture these faint structures plus nine each of RGB exposures for colour.
The telescope is a 10-inch F/4 Newtonian with a QSI 583 camera with Lodestar providing off-axis guiding mounted on an EQ6 mount.Image processing was with Deep Sky Stacker, Pixinsight and Photoshop.
David Davies (20 April 2015).
