Thursday, February 22, 2007

Hickson 40 - Faulkes Telescope North

Hickson 40 (also cataloged as ARP321) is a fairly bright compact group of galaxies 300 million light years away in Hydra. The brightest component (HCG40a) is around magnitude 12, and the faintest (HCG40e) around magnitude 17. Again, this group contains a nice mix of sprial and elliptical galaxies and was imaged by the 8.2m Subaru telecope and shown on APOD 8 years ago. Although we didn't get as deeper image as the Subaru, it does have 16 times the light gathering power! Still, you can easily disern the main spiral galaxies in the cluster.

This is the second image from the Faulkes Hickson Compact Galaxy set - please see the previous post below for more details about the Hickson catalog and Faulkes telescope in general.


3 sets of 120 second images were registered and stacked for each of the RGB channels. A pseudo luminance image was created by stacking the calibrated RGB frames and then more agressively processed and recombined back into the final LRGB composite.

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