NGC6503, in the constellation of Draco, is unremarkable except for where it is. It is situated in the Local Void. This is a vast area of space, within the Virgo supercluster of galaxies and adjacent to the Milky Way galaxy, which is relatively devoid of matter. Our galaxy resides within a structure known as the local sheet which bounds the void and is moving away from the void at about 300 kilometres/sec. The cause seems to be that gravity causes galaxies to clump together leaving voids. Any galaxy within the void is usually moving at high speed towards the nearest cluster, but I haven't been able to discover the velocity of NGC 6503. The galaxy is 30,000 light-years across and is 17 million light-years away.
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Date and Time: 24th July 2011 23:33 to 23:45 UT Camera: Starlight Xpress MX716 Telescope: LX200 with 0.33 focal reducer and Astronomik CLS filter Capture: Starlight Xpress star_mx7. 20 frames, 60" exposure Processing: star_mx7. Dark-frame subtraction, enhancement factor 25, black level. Irfanview. Conversion to png format. RegiStax. 20 frames stacked, histogram 13-255, Gaussian wavelets Scheme 3 PhotoImpact. Vertical flip. |
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