NGC 6015 is a spiral galaxy, visually located in the constellation Draco. It
appears to be somewhat warped, probably from a long-ago interaction with another galaxy. Technical Information: Ha:L:R:G:B: 280:375:180:165:280 (a total of over 21 hours of light-frame exposure time); here's a chart showing the various subexposures I used in the image (I
took far more, but ended up tossing a lot of subexposures for a variety of reasons): Equipment: RC Optical Systems 14.5 inch Ritchey-Chretien carbon fiber truss telescope, with ion-milled optics and RCOS field flattener, at about f/9, and an SBIG STX-16803 camera with
internal filter wheel (SBIG filter set), guided by an SBIG STX guider, all riding on a Bisque Paramount ME German Equatorial Mount. Image Acquisition/Camera Control: Maxim DL, controlled with ACP Expert/Scheduler, working in concert with TheSky X. Processing: All images calibrated (darks, bias and sky flats), aligned, combined and cropped in Pixinsight. Color combine in Pixinsight. Some finish work (background neutralization,
color calibration, NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator and color combine) done in Pixinsight; some cleanup finish work was done in Photoshop 2025. Location: Data acquired remotely from Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California, USA. Date: Images taken on many nights in April and May of 2025. Image posted September 22, 2025. Date: Image scale of full-resolution image: 0.56 arcseconds per pixel. Seeing: Generally poor to fair CCD Chip temperature: -25C Copyright 2025 Mark de Regt
NGC 6015 presents to us quite angles from face-on, giving the apparent elliptical shape. It is very uncertain how far away NGC 6015 is, with many scientific estimates being around
55 million light years away from us; at that distance (subtending an angle of about 7.5 arcminutes in our sky), the diameter is about 120,000 light years (our Milky Way galaxy, a
very large galaxy, is thought to be about 120,000 light years across). The entire field of the uncropped versions is a bit larger than the angular size of a full moon.
There is one oddity in this image. Directly below (in this image) the galaxy, near the bottom edge of this cropped version, are a couple of "tiny" galaxies. One of them looks
a lot like a comet, but it is a galaxy.
This image is a cropped piece of the entire field I photographed; if you click through where indicated, there are three different resolution versions of the entire (uncropped) version.
As is often the case with large-field deep-sky photographs, there are a lot of tiny (meaning, of course, very far away) galaxies in the background of this photo (including and especially a
number that show significant structure).
Luminance: 23 fifteen-minute and 10 three-minute
Red: 12 fifteen-minute
Green: 11 fifteen-minute
Blue: 14 twenty-minute
Luminance layer is a blend of the two sets of luminance-filtered images and the Ha data.
Red is a blend of the red-filtered images and the Ha data.
Green is entirely the green-filtered images.
Blue is entirely the blue-filtered images.