NGC 4725 & NGC 4712 (2023)

Although these galaxies appear close, they are actually quite far apart. NGC 4725 is the closest galaxy at 40 million light-years away and happens to be the smaller one even though it appears larger. It is a barred spiral galaxy over 100 thousand light-years across. Interestingly, the galaxy only has one large arm that makes 2-1/2 revolutions around the core. The arm has many prominent blue regions indicating newborn star clusters. The smaller galaxy, NGC 4712, is larger than NGC 4725 in actual size at 150,000 light-years across but is over 200 million light-years away. I decided to image this by doing a random search on Stellarium and thought it would make a good project with my C8. Ironically, I found many other people that I follow also doing this object - great minds think alike.

There appears to be many smaller galaxies in this Field of View which is not surprising given the location in the constellation of Coma Berenices, a region of space rich in galaxies. NGC 4725 had a surprising amount of detail as did NGC 4712. The central dust lanes are really quite visible and even the faint ones near the core. The colors were fairly easy to pull out without much adjustment, however, that made not going overboard with color saturation difficult especially for me since I tend to saturate to the fullest extent. With this in mind I held back and attempted not to oversaturate.

NGC 4725 & NGC 4712 (2023)
Dates: 4-12-23, 4-13, 4-19, 4-20, 4-25
Camera: ZWO ASI294MC-Pro
Telescope: Celestron EdgeHD 800
Barlow: None
Focal Length: 2032mm (native), 1400mm
F/10 (native), F/7
Focal Reducer: Celestron 0.7 Reducer Lens
Mount: Orion Atlas Pro
Filter Adaptor: ZWO Filter Drawer
Filter: Optolong Luminosity
Focuser: ZWO EAF
Autoguiding: ASI120 Mini attached to an Orion ST80
Exposure: Lum 475 x 90
Gain: 139
Offset 0
Temp: 0 C
Processing: Asiair app, PixInsight, Photoshop, BlurXT, NoiseXT, StarX, Bill's Color Masks

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