The Galaxies of Coma Berenices.

 

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).