- Apr 3, 2021

NGC7479-GB, my furthest named object so far at 1.63Billion Light years

While away at work in Qatar and no access to do any new astro imaging, what can we do. Well, I put this together following analysis of some of my older images.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I have frequently tried to identify objects in my images to try and see just what has been lurking in the field of view. Small faint galaxies stand elongated against the round stars, but often these are so distant they do not appear on the various star/sky maps like Stellarium/Skymap etc.

Chuck (from Chuck's Astrophotography, go subscribe to him if you haven't already! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCllh0nUmlREEvoskaq9b3A), pointed me in the direction of AladinLite (http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/AladinLite/) and from this, I was able to identify two galaxies lurking in my NGC 7479 image. Then, following a little bit more digging, I was able to locate a research paper by M.F. Saraiva and G.F. Benedict, who calculated the distance of these galaxies. The furthest was 1.63 Billion light years.

The research paper can be found at: https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2003/39/aa3868/aa3868.html

This was a relatively short integration image (2 hours) and during my initial days of owning the scope, so the quality of the image was probably very poor by some standards! Never the less the smudge was still present, so it counts!