NGC 6140 is a barred spiral galaxy,
visually located in the constellation Draco. It presents to us angled a bit away from being face-on to us, giving it the slightly elliptical shape that we see. It is thought to be about 37 million light years away from us, which
give it a diameter of approximately 86,000 light years, making it a relatively large galaxy (our Milky Way now is thought to be about 30% larger). Because it is so far away, this pretty galaxy appears to us
to be quite small (about 6 arcminutes across); for the same reason, it is quite dim, shining at about magnitude 11. The entire field of the uncropped versions is about the angular size of a full moon. Technical Information: Ha:L:R:G:B: 360:880:180:180:240 (a total of almost 32 hours of light-frame exposure time); there are forty-four 20-minute exposures and twenty 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 and June of 2024. Image posted December 16, 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 few that show significant
structure.