NGC 5410 and UGC 8932 are a pair of apparently interacting galaxies in Canes Venatici about 180 million light-years distant. NGC 5410 is classed as SB? while its companion is an irregular Magellanic type galaxy. A large plume seems to come from NGC 5410 sort of toward UGC 8932 but it extends well beyond the companion. A much fainter plume comes off the other end. The galaxy itself is rather off-center looking. UGC 8932 doesn't seem massive enough to have caused this, however. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find much at all on this pair. They seem rather isolated with nothing else in the image having their redshift. In fact, nothing comes within a billion light-years of this pair. Now that's isolated. Their redshifts are almost identical which seems more than a coincidence. Both have bright star knots and are quite blue in color indicating a lot of new stars in both. NGC 5410 was discovered by William Herschel on April 9, 1787. It isn't in either Herschel 400 observing program, however.

The field contains several galaxy clusters including an Abell cluster that may encompass some of the others. One rather bright asteroid snuck into the top of my image traveling almost due west. The image contains several quasars as well which Arp thought related to active or strange galaxies like these two. Though he spent a lifetime trying to prove this he never could and his idea has pretty much died with him. One object that NED identifies as a quasar it also lists as an AGN. Its PSF in my image is that of a galaxy rather than a quasar and it is only about 2 billion light-years distant. Many galaxies in the image are further away. To me, the AGN label fits better than quasar though its core is very bright making seeing the galaxy difficult, even for the Sloan telescope. Yet another quasar/AGN is listed at 2.5 billion light-years. It is more starlike but has the PSF of a small galaxy the same as the other one, just not as obvious to the eye.

This was taken on about the only really transparent night of this spring. I used to have this transparency as the norm but the last two years such nights have been few and far between. I probably should have taken advantage of it but the object was already past the meridian when I started so I was limited to what I could do and still be within my Tpoint map and region of best seeing. Still, conditions were holding and I could have gone over to using a guide star but I was working in automatic mode not realizing this was such a good night. The system can't change over without my assistance and I was snoozing away at the time unaware of the night's quality. It had started out pretty poor.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' RGB=2x10', STL-11000XM, Paramount ME