This is one of the finest "Galaxy-Needles" in the heaven above, but it has a huge disadvantage for telescopes in the far south: located far north at a declination of +26° it suffers from a lot of atmospheric dispersion if beeing photographed at the CTIO (-30° south).
NGC4565 is the brightes member of the Coma I cluster at a distance of 42.7 ± 12 million lightyears.Its apparent size of nearly 15 arcminutes and its brightness (10.4mag) makes it an easy object for telescopes of all sizes.
As already mentioned:it is one of the finest edge-on-galaxies and is suggested to be a barred spiral.It was first seen in 1785 by William Herschel.
position:
RA.: 12h 36m 20.8s
Decl.: +25° 59′ 16"
image data:
25x1200s, RGB = 10x1200s each,a total of 18.4 hours
80cm f/7 AstroOptik Keller corrected cassegrain FLI Proline 16803 Astrodon LRGB GenII filters
Prompt 7 CTIO/UNC Chile,remote controlled
image processing: Bernd Flach-Wilken
this picture of 98% FLI-FOV shows this exceptionally fine galaxy in all its beauty, accompanied by the much weaker compagnion NGC4562 (upper left)
click here to get a full resolution result
here is a more deatiled version,showing many of the fine deatils in its dustplane:
here you can link to a high-res-HST image,showing some subtle details of an NGC4565-arm