Date Posted: 1/22/2024
Date Taken: Three nights, from 12/14 - 12/20/2023
Scope: Planewave CDK 12.5 f/8, 2541mm
Camera: SBIG STL-11000 with Astrodon Tru-Balance E-Series Gen2 filters
Temp: -25C
Mount: Losmandy Titan
Guiding: On-axis via ONAG-XM and SX UltraStar at 2541mm. FocusLock real-time focus for focusing.
Exposure: LRGB, 435:145:145:140. Luminance 15min unbinned; RGB 5min binned 2x2.

Calibrated and Stacked with CCDStack2; RGB combine and DDP with MaximDL. Processed with CS4.

Arp 94 is a particularly interesting pair of interacting galaxies in Leo. It consists of NGC 3227, a spiral galaxy, and NGC 3226, a dwarf elliptical galaxy; they are about 77 million light years away. Of particular interest (to me at least) are the tital tails resulting from the interactions, including the faint one below the galaxy pair in this image. The smaller lenticular galaxy off to the right is NGC 3222, at a distance of 127 million light years. The image also contains another interesting pair of interacting galaxies, at about 11 o'clock from NGC 3222, and a third of the way down the image. They are SDSS J102247.38+194730.2 on the left and NPM1G +20.0234 on the right. They are a whopping 540 million light years away.

There aren't a ton of amateur images of this pair. I collected a fair amount of signal (14.4 hours), to try and bring out as much of the tidal streams as I could. Processing was a challenge, because the bright mag 2.28 star Algeba was just off the right side of the image; it made for some interesting gradients across the image, and some strange colors. The two far-off interacting galaxies and the lower tidal tail were stretched a bit more than the rest of the image.