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The Needle galaxy is almost perfectly edge-on displaying the central core and dust lanes. It is located in the Coma Berenices constellation about 40 million light years away and about 100,000 light years in diameter. Its closest neighbor, and the largest in theses images, is the NCG 4562 galaxy. In the wide angle image, notice 4 to 5 other galaxies.

Needle Galaxy wide angle, F2.0 Equipment Celestron 11 GPS guiding with an Orion ShortTube 80 and Orion Autoguider. Imaged with an Atik 460 Monochrome through Starizona’s Hyperstar. Image Luminance: 57, 3 minute exposures (almost 3 Hours) on 4/18/2015 Color: are all 3 minute exposures, 12 for red, 13 for green and 11 for blue, (almost 2 hours total) on 4/25/2015. Processing: All images were calibrated, stacked and processed using Nebulosity. LRGB combined and final processing in Photoshop. Full size image scale at a distance of 40 million light years Width: 2511 Pixels = 70 arc minutes, a bit more than twice the width of the moon Height: 1678 Pixels = 47 arc minutes Object size information (full size image): Image width and height = 814,282 X 544,152 light years Pixel size = 1.9 quadrillion miles or 3 quadrillion kilometers. One pixel width is about the width of 340,000 of our solar systems.

Needle Galaxy High Resolution Equipment Celestron 11 GPS guiding with an Orion off-axis guider with a Lodestar X2 autoguider, f6.3 focal reducer / F7.5 Starizona field corrector and imaged with an Atik 460 Monochrome’s Hyperstar. Image Luminance: Focal length 6.3 = 18 @ 3minutes and 12 @ 4minutes Luminance: Focal length 7.5 = 31 @ 3minutes Luminance: Total: 175 minutes or 2.9 hours of exposure. Color: From the wide angle shot above Processing: All images were calibrated, stacked and processed using Nebulosity. LRGB combined and final processing in Photoshop. .45 Arcseconds / pixel Full size image scale at a distance of 40 million light years Width: 2196 Pixels = 16.3 arc minutes, about half the width of the moon Height: 1492 Pixels = 11.1 arc minutes Object size information (full size image): Image width and height = 189,902 X 129,023 light years Pixel size = 86.5 light years or 508 trillion miles or 508 quadrillion kilometers. One pixel width is about the width of 65,434 of our solar systems.