NGC 5054

Click on image for larger version.

This colorful, somewhat irregular Herschel 400 spiral in Virgo is visible as a faint glow in a 6" telescope, according to Luginbuhl and Skiff and appears elongated with a mottled core in a 16/18" scope at 150x, according to Kepple and Sanner. At magnitude 10.9v, this galaxy shows a lot of detail and color in this moderate exposure, made using separate luminance, red, green and blue frames. Dust lanes are evident, especially to the southwest of the core, and bluish star forming regions in the two major spiral arms are quite striking. The irregular morphology of the galaxy hints at a possible interaction sometime in the past. A redshift of .058 gives a Hubble distance for this galaxy of 82 million light years, assuming no peculiar motion and using a value of 75 k/s/Mps for the Hubble constant.

The faint spiral to the northeast, which appears almost edge-on, is magnitude 16 MCG-3-34-40. (Caption by Robert Kuberek)

Equipment

20in RC Optical Systems telescope Operating at f/8.4
Paramount ME Robotic Telescope Mount
SBIG ST10XME CCD camera with color filter wheel

L R G B color production was used to create this image.

Luminance = 90 minutes binned 1x1
 Red = 20 minutes binned 2x2
 Green = 20 minutes binned 2x2
 Blue = 20 minutes binned 2x2
  • One iteration of CCDsharp was applied to this image.
  • Digital Development (DDP) via Maxim/DL was also used in order to display the the very dim and very bright details of the image simultaneously.

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    Minimum credit line: Jon and Bryan Rolfe/Adam Block/NOAO/AURA/NSF

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    Updated: 03/26/2003