This suite of
Astrobin Debut Galaxies is located in the constellation of Virgo at a declination of +2 degrees. How did such an interesting galaxy grouping escape the attention of imagers for so long?
Amongst many interesting galaxies structures, I am most intrigued by NGC 4045, at upper right. This is the closest galaxy in the frame at 110 million light years away. It is also the brightest, at magnitude 12. NGC 4045 spans 3 arc-minutes in our apparent view. This corresponds to a diameter of 100,000 light years. From our view perspective, the disk is inclined about 30 degrees from edge-on. I like the inner lens structure, the short arms, and the diffuse outer disk with void middle regions left and right. The small galaxy just below it, PGC 38033, is much further away at 240 million light years.
The galaxy group at left is designated as MKW 4 in the 1975 paper "cD Galaxies in Poor Clusters", by Morgan, Kayser & White. The paper studied the presence of supergiant cD elliptical galaxies in small galaxy clusters. The massive galaxy at left, NGC 4073, in one such supergiant. It is 280 million light years away and is a massive 330,000 light years in diameter, almost 3 times larger than our Milky Way.
The other galaxies of the MKW 4 are also about 280 million light years away and are close enough to each other to show some signs of interaction.
In the background are about a jillion very faint galaxies. This is one of those regions of the sky containing many more galaxies than stars.
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