NGC 5529 is a very large intermediate spiral galaxy, presenting to us edge-on. NGC 5529 is estimated to be about 144 million light years away from us (much farther away from us than most galaxies which I image; to put that in a bit of perspective, the Jurassic Period on Earth had just ended when the photons I captured to make this photograph started their journey to us); at that distance, NGC 5529 is about 260,000 light years in diameter (about twice the size of our Milky Way, itself a large galaxy).

As usual in a deep-sky image, there are a lot of small (meaning more distant) galaxies in the image (look for the oblong and/or fuzzy "stars"). In particular, and unusually, there are a large number of background galaxies large enough to see spiral structure, some of which are interacting with NGC 5529 (easier to see in the, uncropped higher-resolution versions linked above).

Technical Information:

L:R:G:B: 765:150:225:240 (a total of 23 hours of light-frame exposure time); luminance was a blend of 15-minute images and 3-minute images; red and green exposures were all 15-minute exposures; blue all 20-minute exposures.

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 and combined in Pixinsight. Color combine in Pixinsight. Some finish work (background neutralization, color calibration, BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, multiscale median transform, HDR composition) done in Pixinsight; some cleanup finish work was done in Photoshop CC.

Location: Data acquired remotely from Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California, USA.

Date: Images taken on many nights in May of 2023. Image posted October 29, 2023.

Date: Image scale of full-resolution image: 0.56 arcseconds per pixel.

Seeing: Generally good; luminance images varied in FWHM from 1.6 to 2.2 arcseconds.

CCD Chip temperature: -25C

Copyright 2023 Mark de Regt

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