NGC 4631 and NGC 4656 (The Whale and the Hockey Stick)

Last Sunday (the 19th April 2026) the weather was dry and clear and the Moon was two days after new. As we get ever closer to May the twilight impinges more and more on our evening sky. On this particular night astronomical twilight ended at about 22:15 BST, so quite late! My target for this evening was the pair of galaxies NGC 4631 and NGC 4656 in Canes Venatici, nicknamed the Whale and the Hockey Stick. Here is what I obtained after 408x15s (1 hour 42 minutes) of observation on my Dwarf 3:-

The first frame was taken at 21:59 BST and the last at 00:10 on the 20th. The Astro filter was employed and the gain was 60. The image was processed in Stellar Studio with auto settings and the saturation and sharpening were increased in Photoshop. The image is binned x2. For obvious reasons, the Whale Galaxy (NGC 4631) is the one in the upper centre of the frame and the Hockey Stick (NGC 4656) is the one below. Here is an unbinned cropped version of this image:-

The two galaxies do look remarkably like their moniker's. The Whale is an edge-on spiral galaxy and it has a smaller elliptical galaxy NGC 4627 floating above its back. The Hockey Stick galaxy is another edge-on barred spiral galaxy that has been distorted by gravitational interaction with the Whale. In fact both galaxies have been affected by this encounter as star formation has been induced in both. If you look closely at the Hockey Stick (click on the image) you can see a faint band of blue stars stretching off to the left of the blade.

All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2026