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Old 05-09-2016, 06:21 PM
Placidus (Mike and Trish)
Narrowing the band

Placidus is offline
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Euchareena, NSW
Posts: 3,719
Grus western Triplet 7162, 7162A, 7166, and 130 friends

Another, different, trio in Grus. NGC 7162A is the large, bright blue, face-on star-burst disrupted spiral toward 11 o'clock. The very bright, dominant featureless orange elliptical toward 7 o'clock is NGC 7166, and the prettier, more normal half-face-on spiral toward 4 o'clock is NGC 7162. So (with North up) that makes 4711.

Compulsory original image here.

These fellows are not as bright as the more famous Grus triplet. This exposure is 24 hours of Luminance, and 3 hrs each of RGB, all in 1 hr subs.

The color contrast between the disrupted spiral and the elliptical is very obvious, and took little encouragement to show.

The field shows 130 background galaxies that are obvious because of their shape - mostly distant edge-on spirals. If there are that many edge-on spirals, my guess is that rather a lot of the amorphous orange blobs are distant ellipticals, especially where they seem to cluster into family gaggles.

At the extreme top left of the original image (not the cropped low-res thumb) is a set of four galaxies, two of which are in a deadly embrace, and shedding long tidal tails as they dance toward union.

Aspen CG16M on 20" PlaneWave. All processing in GoodLook 64. Field 36 min arc, 0.55 sec arc/pixel.

Best,
Mike and Trish
Attached Thumbnails
Click for full-size image (Grus Trio 2 7162 7162A 7166 L 24hrs RGB 3hrs each Thumb..jpg)
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Last edited by Placidus; 07-09-2016 at 09:00 PM.
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