West Cornwall Astronomical Society Image a Pair of Interacting Galaxies

For the past two years West Cornwall Astronomical Society (WCAS) has been using the Faulkes Telescope North (FTN) in Hawaii to obtain some interesting images.

This all started with involvement in a training session run by the Faulkes Telescope team from Cardiff. The session was held at the CPR Learning Centre, Camborne, Cornwall. The Cardiff team covered an introduction to the Faulkes project, instruction on controlling the telescope, use of a simulator for practicing observation sessions, and use of some data processing software techniques for producing colour images from the raw data returned by the telescope.

They now have a collection of images on their website, and have learned a great deal about image processing, using different examples of photographic software.

Their latest image is of the Heron galaxy, NGC 5395.

NGC 5395 and NGC 5394 are two interacting galaxies that collided some millions of years ago. The morphology of the pair suggests that NGC 5394 (the smaller galaxy to the north) passed, cart wheeling through NGC 5395 as opposed to a grazing encounter.

Apparent magnitudes are 13.6 and 12.7 respectively. NGC 5395 has several dark dust lanes, and knotty spiral arms. The companion galaxy NGC 5394 has prominent inner and outer spiral arms. The inner arms appear as a nearly complete central circle. NGC 5395 is roughly 184 million light years distant, and is 155,000 light years in size.

A supernova, SN2000CR, was detected in NGC 5395 in 2000, at magnitude 17. This has dimmed since then, but is still just visible in the dark lane between the outer two spiral arms, at between 11.0 o’clock and 12 o’clock.

A galaxy is just visible at the edge of the image, to the right of NGC 5394. This is an 18 magnitude distant elliptical known as PGC 211092.