M106 - Spiral Galaxy

This image of M106 was a bit of an afterthought when the Sombrero Galaxy disappeared behind my house and there was a still some darkness left in the sky.  It's composed of three minute light frames which suffered from poor guiding, satellite trails and clouds and so were whittled down to only twelve usable subs. 

So after one night's imaging with my new camera and using the ASIair for the first time for colour imaging I'm quite pleased with the results.  The lack of amp glow and the ease of taking flats compared to the AA294c camera is giving some hope for some good images this year.

Various Deep Sky Object Test Shots

Here are a few test shots using my Celestron C6se SCT telescope without a focal reducer.  Although this gives me a focal length of 1500mm, it is not generally recommended as the scope works natively at f/10 and a reducer takes this down to f/7 - so not using a reducer means that a lot less light is gathered for the same exposure time. My reducer also flattens the field of view making stars better shapes on the edges of the image.  However, as I am still cropping all these galaxies to some extent, I can remove poor stars at the edges in the process.  I think that these images show that it is possible to work at f/10 but that a lot more data is needed, and this is something will try as the dark nights get longer.

The Needle Galaxy

The Sunflower Galaxy

M106 - 'The Galaxy with No Name'

M106 annotated by Astrometry.net

Catching up with Messier 109 - A Spiral Galaxy

It's been quite a while since I updated my blog, nearly a year in fact. The latter half of last year and particularly the winter period wasn't very good for astrophotography because of the weather - we seemed to have weeks and weeks of cloudy skies with very few breaks. The winter constellations like Orion will have to wait for another year! 

It was very similar at the start of this year too, but things got a little better in February and March and I managed to make some progress in my images and image processing techniques. I've managed to keep posting a few things to my Flickr account throughout this time, and now I'm turning to my blog. I'm going to work from today backwards to post all the images I've taken since last May.

So here's an image of Messier 106 (also known as NGC 4258) whcih is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation of Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. M106 is about 22 to 25 million light-years away from Earth and contains an active nucleus classified as a Type 2 Seyfert. The presence of a central supermassive black hole has been demonstrated from radio-wavelength observations of the rotation of a disk of molecular gas orbiting within the inner light-year around the black hole. A Type II supernova was observed in M106 in May 2014. Here's a closeup view of M106 cropped from the above image. It clearly shows the galaxy's spiral arms.

And finally this widefield view of my image has been annotated in www.astrometry.net and shows how rich the region is in deep sky objects including NGC 4217, a possible companion galaxy of M106.