I actually wanted to shoot the globular cluster M3 last night, but sight of this area was blocked by the deck from our neighbor upstairs. Luckily, there was another interesting deep-sky object that peaked around the corner.
In the constellation Coma Berenices, not far from the Virgo galaxy cluster, lies the spiral shaped galaxy NGC 4565. From Earth, we view the spiral edge-on and due to this narrow shape, it’s commonly referred to as the Needle Galaxy. A dark dust lane crosses the central bulge of the galaxy.
26 March 2017 – NGC 4565 – The Needle Galaxy
This picture is a crop from the full frame (click for full size)
154 x 30 sec (1 hour 17 minutes)
white zone (SQM < 18)
The full clearly shows the bright elliptical galaxy NGC 4494 near the top of the frame and a smaller companion galaxy NGC 4562 near the right of the Needle Galaxy. It also contains many (faint) smaller galaxies that are easily mistaken for stars. I used PixInsight to annotate my image.
(click for full size)
Astro Virus 
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