The four brightest members of
Hickson Compact Group 44 are listed above, corresponding to the galaxies going from left
to right in the image. The tidal streams of NGC 3190 and the distorted shape of NGC 3187
are evidence of gravitational interaction. Hickson 44 is located about 80 million
light-years from our galaxy. The full-resolution image shows many small galaxies in the
background.
Equipment: Meade
14" LX200R/STL-11000M/Astrodon LRGB filters/Paramount ME
F-ratio: f/9.5
Exposures: LRGB: L 27 x 10 minutes, binned 2x2: R 12 x 10
minutes: G 13 x 10 minutes: B 12 x 10 minutes: RGB binned 3x3
Date: March 5 and 25, 2011
Location: Landers, California, USA
Technical Notes: Individual exposures were dithered using CCDAutoPilot2 and then sigma combined. The RGB image was created in Registar 1.0.
A high-pass filter was applied to portions of the luminance image. Reduce Noise and
Gaussian Blur were applied to the dim portions of the RGB and luminance images. A
duplicate of the RGB image was combined with the original using Soft Light to increase
color saturation.
