This galaxy is only about 30 million light years away. It is a grand spiral in shape but only about 65,000 light years across, about 2/3rds the size of our Milky Way.
There are several smaller galaxies—9 of them!—in the image along the right side of NGC 3344. Most are around 770 million light years away, give or take thirty million.
The dimmest stars in the image are about magnitude 19.
On the night I took these frames, the seeing was not great. At the resolution of the system I used, I could only shoot within 22 degrees or so of zenith. This image was shot at a scale of 0.566 arcsec/pixel. The image covers 12.8 x 9.72 arc minutes of sky. I used 9x720" subframes taken with the SXVF-H9 camera at an effective focal length of 2,350mm. The telescope used was the CFF 290 f/13.5 Classical Cassegrain. The camera shot through an Astronomik CLS filter.
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