Now that the Coma Berenices galaxies are finally clearing my
trees at around 9:30 pm Eastern, I’m able to start imaging them. Last night, I
thought I would try NGC 4911. I didn’t check to see the angular diameter, so I
was surprised that all I could see in the stacked image were (apparent) stars.
The surprise was how many of these stars were galaxies. NGC 4911 is towards the
center of the image. It is very small, and its structure can be just about seen
on high zoom. I’ve also included an annotated image of the field and you can
see just how many galaxies were captured in the wide FOV of the RASA (click and
zoom for more detail). I estimate the limiting magnitude on this image is about
21. Not exactly Hubble Deep Field (which reached 32!), but not bad for 559 x 7s
integrations on the DS 10C (no gain, no binning) with L-Pro filter and a bright
moon relatively close by. (BTW, that’s a total integration time of about 65
minutes).
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