NGC 4517 is a spiral galaxy located in the constellation of Virgo and shares a rich field of galaxies just waiting to be hunted down for the interested observer. I personally like the pairing of this edge on spiral with the face on spiral, NGC 4517A (a.k.a. Reinmuth 80) across to the right at the 3 to 4 o'clock position. I actually think that NGC 4517A look a little like a smaller version of NGC 6744.
The main galaxy - NGC 4517 - displays a quite noticeable dust lane down the centre and blue areas which are most likely groupings of young hot stars. NGC 4517 is about 40 million light years from Earth.
To save everyone the trouble of trying to count all of the background galaxies in the image (because I know you will
), I used the plate solve function in Pixinsight to annotate the image to identify all of the galaxies it could find. See attached image. The field is certainly crazy with galaxies to be sure.
Link to image on Astrobin here.
Here is a
link to the image on Flickr as well as it is good for panning around the image.
Acquisition and technical details can be found in the Astrobin post.
Clear skies,
Rodney