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Hickson 44 — Something in the Nothing

Hickson 44 isn't the sort of target that normally draws me in. I like structure — dust lanes, sweeping arms, filaments and details that invite you to keep moving closer. Here, the structures are certainly present, but at roughly 60 million light-years away, they're packed into four relatively small galaxies scattered across a much larger field.

And perhaps that's what eventually made this one interesting.

The group includes the prominent edge-on spiral NGC 3190, crossed by a dark dust lane; the dramatically distorted NGC 3187; the barred spiral NGC 3185; and elliptical NGC 3193. Together they form one of the compact galaxy groups cataloged by astronomer Paul Hickson.

Processing became less about trying to manufacture detail these galaxies simply couldn't provide at this image scale, and more about preserving what was actually there. The image was processed at a larger scale and ultimately reduced, allowing the available structure to settle into a more natural presentation rather than sharpening it into something it wasn't.

But my favorite part may be everything that isn't Hickson 44.

The longer I looked into the dark background, the less empty it became. Tiny points, faint smudges and barely resolved galaxies begin appearing throughout the field — objects vastly farther away than the four galaxies that first attracted the camera.

So perhaps this image did give me the structure I was looking for.

I just had to stop looking for all of it in one place.

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