Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

The clouds have been pesky lately, being clear in the day and clouding up at night. However I finally was able to get 100 minutes worth of luminance subframes (10, 10 minute subs) of the NGC 5846 group of galaxies in Virgo . In the next few days I hope take some more luminance subs to reduce the noise in the image and to add Red, Green, Blue and Hydrogen Alpha subframes to be able to generate a color image. In this image you can see the following NGC objects starting at the upper right and going to the lower left. The image below was taken with a full frame CCD camera at 4096mm focal length.

NGC 5850- Barred Spiral Galaxy - distance ~112 million light years from earth and based on its disturbed morphology is thought to have had a close encounter with NGC 5846 ~200million years ago. Brightness Magnitude 10.8

NGC 5846 - Large Elliptical Galaxy - distance ~93 million light years from earth. Brightness Magnitude 10.1. It has a companion name NGC 5846A that can be seen in its glow in the image below and appears to have been tidally stripped by its large companion.

NGC 5845- Small Elliptical Galaxy - distance ~67 million light years from earth. Brightness Magnitude 12.5

NGC 5839 - Spiral Galaxy - distance ~56 million light years from earth. Brightness Magnitude 12.7

On close inspection of this image you can find a number much more distance galaxies. None of these are listed in my charts. All questions, comments and suggestions are welcome.

NGC 5846 Group

(Download)

Marc G Loc: East Grinstead, West Sussex, England

great work mate

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi Marc
Thanks for checking out the NGC 5846 group shot and for the comment.

fjwallace

Nice image! It is always amazing to me how many galaxies you can see in the background as well! Thanks for sharing!
Jon

joehel2 Loc: Cherry Hill, NJ

Beautifully done.

alberio Loc: Casa Grande AZ

Making me jealous.

Bloke Loc: Waynesboro, Pennsylvania

Nice image, but not sure about the math... If NGC 5850 and NGC 5846 are 19 million light years apart, it is unlikely that they had a tidal disruption event 200 million years ago. That is almost 10 times more distant than M31, the Andromeda galaxy (2.5 million light years), which is hurtling towards us at a ridiculous rate of speed, but is not estimated to get 'here' for some 5 billion years...

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi fjwallace
Thanks for checking out the image and for the comment. Yep virtually every shot I take even in small fields of view like this one have a number of background galaxies off in the distance. Some estimates on the number of galaxies in the visible universe is over trillion. In the Hubble deep field the field of view is the size on a pinhead at arms length and there are 10's of thousands of galaxies visible.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi joehel2
Thanks for viewing the galactic group and for the comment.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi alberio
Thanks for viewing the group of galaxies and for the comment. I'm still having issues with clouds coming by in the evening, had it all setup and lost the tracking star from the high overcast last night.

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi Bloke
Thanks for checking out the images of the galaxies and for the comment. The info I got was from Wikipedia and I did notice the inconsistency with the distance and time. The way out is that the galactic distances are not very accurate. Note depending on the source the value 5850 varied between 108 to 117 million light years and the distance for NGC 5846 was + or - 32 million light years, so they are probably a lot closer together than the values listed. One paper in Japanese disagreed with the theory that the two galaxies where the cause to the morphology of NGC 5850 and had yet another distance for NGC 5850.

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Looks great, Ballard!
Looking forward to what you can do as the weather allows.



I'm still on light dooty.
When I do have the gumption to want to set up, I don't have the skies (like last night).
Sigh... come on June 27th!

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi SonnyE
Thanks for checking out the galactic images, for the comment and the Thumbs up. The skies have been a pain around here. Last night I was all set up and PHD lost the tracking star due to some high over cast coming through. I still hope to get the RGB and HA shots of the group before the moon gets to bright.