NGC 4631 - The Whale Galaxy

NGC 4631 discovered by William Herschel on March 20, 1787. NGC 4631 is a barred spiral galaxy roughly 30 million light years away nestled in the constellation Canes Venatici. The bright section within this galaxy is a place of massive star formation. There have been numerous supernova that have been recorded within NGC 4631 so much so that they are blowing gas out of the plane of the galaxy. The small galaxy seen nearby is NGC 4627, and a galaxy just out of frame — NGC 4656 — distort the Whale Galaxy.

NGC 4631 has a magnitude of +9.3, located RA 12h 42m 08s DEC +32d 32m 26s, with a rough radius

of 60,000 light years and an apparent size of 15.2 x 2.8 arc minutes.

NGC 4631 - The Whale Galaxy February 2, 2019

This image is comprised of 47 images at 2 minutes a piece for a total of 94 minutes of data. 47 light
frames, 60 dark frames, 30 flat frames, and 100 bias frames. Both preprocessing and post processing

done in PixInsight.

Equipment:
CG-5 ASGT

Celestron 8” SCT

Canon T3i

.63x Reducer

Orion Starshoot Autoguider