NGC 4676 The Mice

NGC 4676, known as The Mice, contains two interacting galaxies 300 million light years distant in Coma Berenices at RA 12h 46min 11.3s, DEC +30deg 43min 28s. In this image, north is to the upper right and east is to the upper left. The field is cropped from the original 40′ square to about 16′ square. The northern galaxy with the elongated star stream tail is NGC 4676A and the southeastern galaxy with the curved tidal tail is NGC 4676B. They are mag 14 and together are ~ 2.2′ long, requiring larger apertures for color and definition. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image is presented below from:

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/galaxy/pr2002011h/web/

Barnes and Hibbard did a computer modeling analysis of how such shapes may have evolved:
http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~barnes/research/interaction_models/mice/index.html
Data for my image were acquired automatically with CCDAutoPilot4 running Maxim4.62 and PinPoint Pro5 for image linking. Guiding was done with an SBIG ST-402 on an Astrodon MonsterMOAG off-axis guider. Astrodon Generation 2 LRGB filters were used, Data were calibrated and processed in CCDStack, Maxim and Photoshop CS3.