NGC 5364 is a grand design spiral galaxy,
visually located in the constellation Virgo. It presents to us angled 47 degrees from face-on, giving it the elliptical shape that we see. It is thought to be about 54 million light years away from us, which
give it a diameter of approximately 106,000 light years, making it a relatively large galaxy (our Milky Way now is thought to be of similar size, or perhaps a bit larger). The entire field of the uncropped
versions is about the angular size of a full moon. Technical Information: Ha:L:R:G:B: 420:869:180:180:260 (a total of over 31 hours of light-frame exposure time); there are forty 20-minute exposures and 23 3-minute exposures through the luminance filter;
red and green exposures were all 15-minute exposures; blue and Ha were all 20-minute exposures. The luminance layer consisted of an HDR blend of the 20-minute and 3-minute exposures, with the Ha data blended
in; the red channel is a combination of twelve 15-minute images thorugh a red filter and the Ha data. The green channel is a combination of fifteen 15-minute images through the green filter. The blue
channel is a combination of thorteen 20-minute images through a blue filter. Equipment: RC Optical Systems 14.5 inch Ritchey-Chretien carbon fiber truss telescope, with ion-milled optics and RCOS field flattener, at about f/9, and an SBIG STX-16803 camera with
internal filter wheel (SBIG filter set), guided by an SBIG AO-X, all riding on a Bisque Paramount ME German Equatorial Mount. Image Acquisition/Camera Control: Maxim DL, controlled with ACP Expert/Scheduler, working in concert with TheSky X. Processing: All images calibrated (darks, bias and sky flats), aligned, combined and cropped in Pixinsight. Color combine in Pixinsight. Some finish work (background neutralization,
color calibration, NB blend, Noise XTerminator and Blur XTerminator) done in Pixinsight; some cleanup finish work was done in Photoshop 2024. Location: Data acquired remotely from Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California, USA. Date: Images taken on many nights in May of 2024. Image posted December 9, 2024. Date: Image scale of full-resolution image: 0.56 arcseconds per pixel. Seeing: Generally good. CCD Chip temperature: -25C Copyright 2024
Mark de Regt
This image is a heavily-cropped piece of the entire field I photographed; if you click through where indicated, there are three different resolution versions of the entire (uncropped) version. As is often
the case with large-field deep-sky photographs, there are a lot of tiny (meaning, of course, very far away) galaxies in the background of this photo (including and especially a number that show significant
structure; I'm especially charmed that NGC 5363, the round, lenticular galaxy just to the left of the bright blue star on the center-right of the uncropped photo--which is thought to be gravitationally
interacting with NGC 5364, causing the slight distortion in the arms of NGC 5364--shows distinct dust lanes running vertically through the image); clicking on the full-resolution versions will bring up
an annotated version, labeling many of the more significant galaxies in the field.