NGC 5746 & 5740

NGC5746 is an edge-on spiral in Virgo. It is not part of the main Virgo cluster, being situated to the east near the constellation’s boundaries with Boötes, Serpens and Libra. It is estimated to be 95 million light years distant.

NGC5740 is the face-on spiral, slightly more distant at about 109 mly.

There are a number of fainter, more distant galaxies visible in this view and many are identified in the annotated image below (courtesy the AnnotateImage script in PixInsight/Pleiades Astrophoto).

Exposure times were 9.5 hours luminosity and 11 hours each through red, green and blue filters.

Equipment: Planewave CDK14 corrected Dall-Kirkham telescope, Finger Lakes Instrumentation P9000 CCD camera, Astrodon LRGB filters, Monster Moag off-axis guider with Starlight Xpress Lodestar Pro guide camera.

Acquisition software: ACP Expert Scheduler, Maxim/DL. Image processing: PixInsight.