Messier 104
May. 30th, 2015 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This is another spiral galaxy, just short of edge-on to us, with a very prettily-placed band of dust in the plane of the galaxy - you can see that the nucleus is on the top side.
Tends to be called the Sombrero galaxy. Combination (using software I've just written) of five 90-second exposures; the purple colour cast is an artefact of pulling the levels up to show the faintest stars.

Tends to be called the Sombrero galaxy. Combination (using software I've just written) of five 90-second exposures; the purple colour cast is an artefact of pulling the levels up to show the faintest stars.

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Date: 2015-05-31 06:32 am (UTC)It's your brother, Ben
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Date: 2015-05-31 09:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-05-31 10:42 am (UTC)With my pictures from Portugal I'm certainly not detector-limited; guiding was a bit of a problem on windy nights, critical focus is hard (we had a complicated aperture-screen for helping out with it, but it still required interpreting the positions of invisible lines on the live-view display), the sky was a bit bright (90-second shots had the red channel 40% of the way to saturation), but the optics and the detector weren't a problem.
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Date: 2015-05-31 01:16 pm (UTC)http://astronomynow.com/2015/05/26/dragonflys-compound-eye-reveals-very-faint-galaxy-structure/
show what's being done with modern sensors in a slightly silly way...
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Date: 2015-06-02 03:10 am (UTC)