4 Messier galaxies in Canes Venatici

[Clive]

Canes Venatici contains five Messier objects, four galaxies and one globular cluster.  During the extended clear period in April, I managed to capture the four galaxies.  All four images are 4 hour (80 x 180s) integrations taken with a Canon 200D and 400mm F5.6 lens at ISO1600 on a SW EQM35 mount, and all have an identical FOV of 48 x 72 arc minutes so as to allow comparison of the different size of the galaxies.  Guiding was with PHD2, the images stacked using DSS and processed using IRIS and, for the first time, Starnet.

 

So, in numerical order, first up is M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy.  This was captured on 19th April and was previously posted but has been reprocessed with the FOV the same as the other three images.  The image also includes elliptical NGC5198 (mag 11.7) at lower left, spiral NGC5169 (mag 13.6) and elliptical NGC5173 (mag 12.2) at lower right, and spiral IC4263 (mag 14.5) at centre right.  A few other faint ‘smudges’ down to mag 16.5 are also visible.

 

 

Next is M63, the Sunflower Galaxy, captured on 25th April.  The only other galaxies identified in the image are spirals PGC46386 (mag 14.6) and PGC45992 (mag 14.8) that are on the left and right of the image respectively.

 

 

M94, the Cat’s Eye Galaxy, captured on 24th April.  Due to the large intensity range present in this galaxy (on the unprocessed images, the inner core had a peak intensity of 25000 ADU whereas the extremely faint outer ring had peak intensity of just 50 ADU), processing this image was more problematic than normal.  In the end I separated the outer ring from the core and stars allowing them to be processed individually.  The outer ring was highly stretched and filtered to make it visible in a JPG image before recombining with the more normally processed core and stars.  As a result, it looks much brighter in this image than it really is.  Only 2 other spirals have been identified in the image, PGC43370 (mag 16.0) in the extreme upper right corner and IC3808 (mag 14.9) in the lower right corner.

 

 

Finally M106 (no alternative name found) captured on 21st April.  After aligning the mount I had a ‘poor alignment’ warning but fortunately I still just managed to capture M106 (the left had side of this cropped image is the actual edge of the uncropped image).  To the right of M106 is the companion spiral NGC4248 (mag 12.4) and at the same distance again to the right are spirals NGC4231 (mag 13.6) and NGC4232 (mag 13.7).  In the top right corner is spiral NGC4220 (mag 11.3) whereas in the lower right are spirals NGC4217 (mag 11.3) and NGC4226 (mag 13.5).  In addition, irregular PGC39615 (mag 15.8) and PGC39437 (mag 17.1) are just identifiable in the image.

 

[+seven_legs]

Stunning shots. Thanks Clive 

[silentrunning]

Great images Clive, well done on processing M94 a really tricky object for the reasons you mention. I took a load of 900s images of it with the 12" RC and got next to nothing of the outer ring and the centre was close to burn out! Gave up trying to process it. In my defence there was a full moon lurking around at the time. 🙂 

[+Bino-viewer]

Galaxys galore.

Nice captures Clive 👍🏼🔭

[BAZ]

Good shots there, loads to look at.

[Stephen]

Great images Clive

[+RonC]

All great images, well done Clive 👍

[Bottletopburly]

Great work Clive 👍

[+Glafnazur]

That's a great set of images Clive 👍

[Clive]

Thanks everyone.  I uploaded these onto my BAA page last night and looking at them on their site they looked almost monochrome so I waited until this morning to tweak the saturation on each of them before uploading them on here. However, looking at them on this site, they now seem completely over coloured - I think I should have just left things alone.

[8472]

Nice set of Images, Clive.

 

I like the shot of NGC4217 in your M106 image.