The plan for the week was the Squid, but the Squid needs darkness and it needs hours, more hours than one clear-but-not-clear-for-long night was going to give me. So I pointed the DWARF 3 at the Whale galaxy instead and let it run. A few nights of that added up to 4 hours 19 minutes on NGC 4631, which is enough to pull the galaxy out of a Bortle 6 sky and, as it turned out, two of its neighbors along with it.
NGC 4631 is the bright streak across the middle. It is a barred spiral we happen to catch almost exactly edge-on, which is why it reads as a long wedge instead of a disk, and that wedge is where the nickname comes from. The distance is one of those numbers I will not pretend to know precisely. Sources put it anywhere between 25 and 30 million light-years and the measurements genuinely disagree, so the honest answer is a range. It is roughly the size of the Milky Way. William Herschel logged it in March 1787.
The small smudge sitting just above the Whale’s core is NGC 4627, a dwarf elliptical that goes by the Pup. It is faint. Even after four hours it stays a soft blob with no real structure, which is about what a magnitude 13 object will give you at 35mm of aperture. The two are interacting, and Halton Arp filed them together as Arp 281 in his 1966 atlas of odd galaxies.
Down in the lower left is the one I did not go looking for. That is NGC 4656, the Hockey Stick, and the bend in it is real, not a stacking artifact. The standard explanation is that the hook is a tidal scar left by a past pass near the Whale and the Pup. All three belong to the same loose group, which sits in a busy patch of sky where the catalogs cannot settle on how many members it even has. Counts run from five to twenty-seven depending on who is doing the counting.
This is the part I like about a short focal length. On a long scope the Whale fills the frame on its own and the Hockey Stick becomes a second pointing or a mosaic. The DWARF 3 takes the whole group in one shot. The cost is resolution. The Pup stays a smudge and the dust lane in the Whale is suggested more than carved. For a wide group portrait I will take that trade.
Stacking in Stellar Studio, finishing in Snapseed, nothing unusual in the pipeline this time. One thing worth pointing out: most of the faint fuzzy dots scattered around the field are not noise and not foreground stars. They are more distant background galaxies, which is what you get when you image through a window this crowded.
The Squid is still waiting. It wants something on the order of thirty to fifty hours of narrowband before it hands over its faint outer shell, and these galaxy nights were partly a way to keep the rig sharp before I commit to that. Partly I just wanted something that shows up in four hours instead of forty.
Clear skies!
Run card
| Target | NGC 4631 (Whale Galaxy / Caldwell 32) |
| Also in frame | NGC 4627 (the Pup), NGC 4656/4657 (Hockey Stick) |
| Constellation | Canes Venatici |
| Dates | Mid-June 2026, across a few clear nights |
| Sky | Backyard, Bortle 6 |
| Instrument | DWARF 3, 35 mm aperture |
| Sensor | Sony IMX678 |
| Mode | EQ |
| Filter | Astro |
| Gain | 50 |
| Sub exposure | 60 s |
| Subs | 259 (mega stack) |
| Total integration | 4 h 19 min |
| Stacking | Stellar Studio |
| Finishing | Snapseed |
Frequently asked questions
How far away is the Whale Galaxy?
NGC 4631 lies roughly 25 to 30 million light-years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. Published distance estimates vary, so a single exact figure would be misleading. It is about the size of the Milky Way.
What is the small galaxy next to the Whale Galaxy?
It is NGC 4627, a dwarf elliptical nicknamed the Pup. It sits about 3 arcminutes from the core of the Whale and the two are gravitationally interacting. At magnitude 13 it stays faint even in long exposures.
Can you image the Whale Galaxy with a small telescope?
Yes. This frame is 4 hours 19 minutes of total integration with a DWARF 3 at 35 mm aperture, shot in EQ mode at gain 50 through the Astro filter using 60 second subs from a Bortle 6 backyard. The galaxy, the Pup, and the nearby Hockey Stick all register. Fine detail such as the dust lane needs more aperture and longer integration.
Why does the Hockey Stick Galaxy look bent?
NGC 4656 and NGC 4657 form a sharp hook thought to result from a past tidal interaction with NGC 4631 and NGC 4627. All three belong to the same galaxy group in Canes Venatici.
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