Messier 104

[fivemack]

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.

Comments

[history-monk.livejournal.com]

That is pretty good. Nobody makes much fuss about the digital sensor revolution, but good consumer ones now compare very well with the ones astronomers were using a decade ago.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

There have clearly been a couple of big advances even in DSLR sensors; I remember a time when ISO 400 was close to unusably noisy, for the D90 I have now ISO1600 is entirely usable, and the current Nikon full-frame (D610) works pretty well at ISO6400.

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.