NGC6015 in Draco

[Martin Pugh]

Hi folks.
imaged from Heaven's Mirror Observatory in Sierra Nevada, NGC 6015 is a warped spiral galaxy in Draco, south of the bowl of the Little Dipper. It's distance is estimated between 55 and 66 million light-years.

The galaxy 'smudge' off to the east is SDSS J155136.52+621728.6.

Take a look at the 4 o'clock position off NGC6015 to see a very interesting galaxy - my limited research on this suggests it is a 'cometary galaxy'. It is listed as PGC 2634580 (mag 17.8) and the one below that is PGC 2634670/

http://www.martinpughastrophotography.id.a u/images/NGC6015_HaLRGB.jpg

This galaxy has very strong HII emissions, which I captured with almost 5 hrs Ha and there are some amazing galaxy clusters around NGC 6015 and off to the right of the image.

So, this is an HaLRGB image consisting of 5:12:4:4:4 hours for a total of 29 hours taken with the 17" CDK and U16M.

Hope you like it.

cheers
Martin

[SkyViking]

Wow, that is without doubt one of the finest galaxy images I have ever seen! Colours and detail look super smooth, both really crisp without being overdone. And an insane amount of background galaxies too, just incredible. What would the limiting magnitude be in this image Martin?

[Stevec35]

A very fine galaxy image Martin. They don't get much better than this.

Cheers

Steve

[RickS]

Really lovely, Martin!

[alpal]

What a beautiful photo - surely that's worthy of an APOD.

[Joshua Bunn]

Do I ever, I could stare into that for ages, So Clean and much detail. I like the shear amount of background galaxies to :thumbsup:

Josh

[Leonardo70]

Never seen ... fantastic subject for me !!
Great shot...

Leo

[Paul Haese]

Superb work Martin. You're on a roll with the weather. The detail is great and the cometary galaxy looks great too. The tiny distant galaxies just add to the field.

[andyc]

wow! First thought was - pretty galaxy, very nice photo. Then I started seeing the clumps and clusters of background galaxies. Really good image, and one worth wandering around and exploring in detail.

[gregbradley]

Gorgeous image.

Is it posted to show a narrow rectangular shot? That is how it is displaying wen I click on it so it must have been cropped heavily or
it isn't displaying the image as a square.

A remarkably clean image with no noise.

You are producing the top galaxy images at the moment and giving Adam Block a run for his money!

Greg.

[TrevorW]

Nice interesting well processed

[Martin Pugh]

Hello everyone and many thanks for the posts.

I had a look around the image and compared it to what I could find in the Sky X, and did find a mag 19.07 galaxy.

Paul - California has had weeks of clear nights, mostly sub-arcsecond, so getting this amount of data has been fairly easy to come by.

Greg - nowt wrong with the full frame, its just that NGC 6015 looked a little small in such a big FOV, so I cropped it show the more interesting features. At the top of the full frame, there is a really weird galaxy.

cheers
Martin

[Ross G]

What an amazing galaxy photo Martin.

Thanks.

Ross.