80 Million Light years away.

My first night outside in nearly a month. Keeping an eye on the forecast, looked like Norwich would cloud over around midnight. I wanted a galaxy group in Virgo that were still low on the horizon unfortunatly they would be up too late to get a couple of hours worth of photons. So I spun the mouse over stellarium and it settled near a couple of little round hoops in Leo. A quick goto and I had settled upon a trio of fuzzies. Beyond reach optically on my 90mm refractor, but a minute test image at 3200 Iso revealed a mist in the centre of the frame. I set up a run of 2 minute guided exposures and returned inside. -10 in the garden was a little to harsh to want to stay outside.

This just over 1degree image shows you a galactic trio of NGC2964(Upper right), NGC2968(centre) and NGC 2970 (Lower Left) with an interval of 6 arc minutes at the northern part of Leo's head. A righthand spiral is NGC2964, has a long axis of about 3 arc minutes and 12th magnitude in brightness at a distance of 72 Million Light Years. And to its left is the irregular galaxy of NGC2968. You can just make out the eliptical galaxy to its left again Mag 14.5 NGC 2970 Both galaxies are about 80 millions light years away and have interacted in the distant past.