The central 34 min arc of the much larger galaxy cluster Abell 1060 in Hydra.
This adds colour, and doubles the luminance, of our earlier version.
Luminance 14.5 hrs in 30 min subs. RGB 2.5 hrs each in 30 min subs.
Big one here
Much of the luminance was collected with pretty good seeing (1.9 sec arc) but intermittent cloud. The rest was collected on a clear night with more ordinary seeing (2.6 sec arc). The colour was collected on a very hot evening where the camera would cool to only -25C instead of our usual -30C. No moon throughout.
There are two extremely dominant foreground stars, at a wild guess red giants. Between them is a half-edge-on spiral, NGC 3312, magnitude 12, with a beautiful salmon-pink nucleus and strongly blue spiral arms showing signs of disturbance from its noisy neighbours.
Off toward 4 o'clock is the visually overlapping pair NGC 3314, not interacting but just superimposed, with the dust from the closest one obscuring the more distant of the pair.
At 5 o'clock is the intriguing NGC 3316. We see a generally amorphous galaxy with a faint but very extended halo, a bright nucleus, and three other small bright blobs which may be involved, or may be line of sight. We can find nothing about these.
The cool star at 2 o'clock, SAO 179027, magnitude 6.5, spectral class K2, appears to have much irregular cloudy material associated with it. Perhaps it is material ejected by the star. That the other, brighter star, SAO 179041, mag 5, spectral class K5, has no such material around it makes it seem less like it is an artifact.
Another interesting small and irregular galaxy underneath the large spiral looks for all the world like a blue coffee bean.
We have counted at least 224 galaxies in the image. Many are featureless ellipticals, which are much easier to pick in the colour image because of their strong orange hue. Many more are spirals showing delightful complex morphology. We were only able to find 177 in the previous single night monochrome image.
Aspen GC16M on 20 inch PlaneWave CDK on MI-750 fork. Acquisition using our own software. Processing using our own GoodLook 64.
Hope you find this area fascinating too.
Very best,
Mike and Trish