NGC 4216 And Friends

I haven’t posted any updates to my website in a while. Over the last few months I have been very busy with a host of different things: nevertheless, I have managed to do some imaging out in the field, and what I’m really short on is time to process raw data and publish results.

So, here I am catching up (well, sort of  ) with this image of the field around NGC 4216, an almost edge-on spiral galaxy. A member of the Virgo Cluster, this galaxy is located in the northernmost part of constellation Virgo, close to the border with constellation Coma Berenicis and is the brightest of a rather well-known spiral galaxy triplet: NGC 4216, NGC 4206 and NGC 4222.

Below is the wider field of view, imaged with a Tecnosky 130/910 refractor, a Moravian Instruments G2-8300 CCD camera with Baader LRGB filters. Total exposure time is 530 minutes (almost 9 hours), of which 200 minutes of L exposure, and the rest equally distributed among the three colors:

The chrominance for this image was processed by Edoardo Radice.

This field is chock-full of galactic objects, as shown in the plate-solved image:

My favorite galaxy is NGC 4189 (on the bottom left in the field), a face-on sweet little “pinwheel” sporting blue spiral arms. Here is a montage of the main galaxies that can be spotted in the wider field of view:

Finally, one more “scientific” remark. NGC 4216 is known to scientists as a “galaxy eater” that has grown bigger by gobbling up its smaller neighbors. The remainders of its “voracity” can be seen in the stellar streams that surround the galaxy. These streams are not so prominent in my image, because it is not “deep” enough, However, a very hard stretch will bring out the brightest portion:

If you want to see the streams in all of their glory, plase have a look here.

The spring sky never ceases to amaze me!