PGC53126 is a ring galaxy in northeastern Virgo about 390 million light-years distant. It is classified as Sab with no mention of the ring that makes it look a lot like Hoag's object. Though there's a hint that the ring is really two spiral arms that do connect to the inner bright area so the ring isn't truly separate from the rest of the galaxy as it is in Hoag's object. I had this one on the to-do list for years but never researched it until now that I had taken it. Turns out there's virtually nothing on it, unlike Hoag's object. Very frustrating. I measure its size at 92,000 light-years.

Conditions were poor as they have been what few nights this spring I could even attempt to take data. I'm rather suspect of the color data as haze layers were coming and going that caused eXcalibrator to really have to adjust color balance far more than I've ever pushed it. Green, the least needed color seemed rather unhurt by the haze while the other colors were very weak in comparison.

When I centered on PGC 53126 I saw NGC 5775 and 5774 off the frame to the east so moved the center west to move them into the field. But I failed to realize that I also needed to move south a bit to catch all of NGC 5774. At least I caught the two IC galaxies in the bottom part of the image. These galaxies are rather normal looking. It's IC 1070 below the two NGC galaxies that looks a lot like an exclamation point without the lower dot. it is likely a member of the same group as the two NGC galaxies, just much smaller at only a bit under 20,000 light-years in length. NGC 5774 is almost 100,000 light-years across thanks to hits faint drawn out arm on the east side. This is likely due to interaction with NGC 5775 which appears a much more massive galaxy thus less disturbed by their interaction. It is only slightly larger in diameter (at least what we can see of it) at just over 100,000 light-years.

NGC 5774 was discovered by Bindon Stoney on April 26, 1851. The much brighter NGC 5775 was discovered 65 years earlier by William Herschel on May 27, 1786. It is in the second Herschel 400 observing program. Unfortunately, my notes from that got lost in our move to Minnesota nor did I log it otherwise.

IC 1066 and IC 1067 have a redshift similar to the two NGC galaxies so are likely part of the same group. I measure 1066 at about 34,000 light-years in size with 1067 being 53,000 light-years across. They were discovered by Stephane Javelle on May 28, 1891.

There are many very distant galaxies in the image but due to lousy transparency many are just so faint I didn't try to annotate them. Picking up only those brighter than 21st. magnitude. Under good transparent skies, I can easily point out galaxies a full magnitude fainter. I did label an Emission Line Galaxy that barely shows in the TIFF version but is very difficult in the lossy compression of the JPG image. It is right at 22 magnitude with a redshift of 7.7 billion light-years look back time.

There are several star-like objects labeled as UvES which stands for Ultraviolet Excess Source. These are candidate quasars with only photographic redshift calculations which can be very wrong. Thus they remain only possibly at extreme distances and thus quasars. Still, I find most that have been fully examined since I started noting such objects, turned out to be real quasars so these too likely will prove real quasars once the full data is obtained.

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