Needle Galaxy

This galaxy season I am revisiting a few favorites I imaged years ago. This time I came back to The Needle Galaxy with better skies, more experience, and a different setup.

This is NGC 4565 - a nearly edge-on spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in Coma Berenices. Its thin disk, prominent dust lane, and bright central bulge make it one of the most striking examples of a spiral galaxy seen from the side.

For this image, I combined data from two telescopes. Same field of view, different strengths, merged into a single result.

Seeing conditions were far from perfect, so a good portion of the data didn’t even make the cut.