Thursday, Jun 5, 2025

The Needle Galaxy NGC 4565 is a spiral galaxy that appears edge-on, that is, with the galactic plane oriented towards the Earth. It is about 45 million light years away and is located in the constellation of Coma Berenices, very high in the sky these days and easily observable even with a modest telescope. This image was taken in Manciano (Italy) and is part of the test images set from the Hord D'Arturo Space Lab observatory, dedicated to the great Italian astronomer who first in the 1930s designed and built a segmented mirror, the progenitor of large modern telescopes. The shooting setup is made of a RC12" truss on a JTW Trident mount, with a Palyer One Poseidon M camera and Baader filters. The shots were taken in LRGB plus Ha, for a total of about 15 hours.