Images from Sunday Night

March 27, 2011

Dick Steinberg

Cone and Foxfur Nebulae - added 20 more minutes of  exposure for a total of 50 minutes over 2 nights. Considerably less noisy than previous 30-minute image.

NGC3945 - 10th magnitude ring galaxy in Ursa Major with amazing resemblance to Saturn. 50 minutes.

M104 - The 8th magnitude Sombrero galaxy in Virgo. 120 minutes.

M59 (center) and M60 (left/east) - a pair of 9th-magnitude large elliptical galaxies in Virgo, both members of the Virgo galaxy cluster. Clearly seen through M60 is the 11th magnitude spiral galaxy NGC4647. M60 has a smaller redshift and is therefore closer than NGC4647. The transparency of M60 is impressive, although not surprising. After all, our own galaxy must be transparent or we would not be seeing any of these distant objects.

The giant elliptical galaxies M84, M86 and numerous other galaxies form the heart of the Virgo galaxy cluster. Especially impressive is NGC4438, the spiral galaxy on the left/east with its tidally disrupted sprays of stars. Anyone know why the nearby ellipticals apparently are not equally distorted?

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Hyperion 317mm f/8 corrected Cassegrain - Paramount ME - Apogee U16M - 4096x4096 nine-micron pixels binned 2x2 - 0.73 arc-sec/unbinned pixel - uncropped field-of-view 50 arc-min square - image acquisition and processing with MaxIm DL 5.14 - calibration (sky-flat/dark/bias) - system automation: CCD Commander 1.6.33 - piggy-back guider Orion 80mm f/11.4 + SBIG ST8 camera - 5-minute subexposures -  Blue Mountain Vista Observatory.