Luna in Monochrome (May 28, 2012)

Full resolution image here.

I thought I'd practice for the transit of Venus.  It was a clear, warm might.  Very nice.  This is a stack of 50 very short images with the SXVF-H9C, converted to monochrome, taken through the SV80ED.

NGC 5850 (May 18, 2012)

This galaxy is a rather difficult target.  Its central bar is fairly bright, but the ring and outer spiral arms are diffuse and difficult to separate from the skyglow above my suburban home.

The galaxy is interesting both because of its morphology and because it appears to have developed asymmetry as a result of its encounter with its larger neighbor to the northwest, NGC 5846, which can be seen glowing at the bottom edge of my image (in which north is to the right).

My favorite image of NGC 5850 comes from the Mt. Lemmon SkyCenter and is linked here.  Ah, what one can do with a 24" scope on top of a mountain.

NGC 5850 is between 58 and 93 million light years away.  Most distance estimates to the apparent neighbor galaxy, NGC 5846, are closer to the larger number.

Trees and dew limited my exposure time to just over 3.6 hours.  The image may improve quite a bit if I double that on a later night.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech Coma Corrector (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: 31x7' thru the SXVF-H9
Filter: Hutech IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX

M106, or NGC 4258 (April 21-22, 2012)

Full resolution image here.

Galaxy M106 is nearby, large, and busy. The galaxy is estimated to be around 22 to 25 million light years away.  At that distance, its size appears to be around 125,000 light years across.  M106 is a Seyfert galaxy, meaning that a spectrum taken of its nucleus appears to show bright light from certain ionized gases moving at great speeds both toward us and away from us.  An accretion disk around a very large black hole is a good explanation for this data, so one is suspected at the heart of M106.  Masers have also been detected in M106 and used to calculate the galaxy's distance.  What a maser is is a little hard to explain, but there is a good introduction here and more information exists around the web.  Also, something in M106 appears to be generating tremendous shock waves that ram into gas near the galaxy's center; the shock waves heat the gas so that it glows with infrared and x-ray radiation.  More details here.  Yup, busy place.

There is a fine Hubble Telescope image of the center of M106 published here.  It is a mirror image of mine, but if you can flip the images in your head, you can easily match features. Clicking on the full resolution link just under the image above may help with the comparison.  The features are most easily matched when my image is at its original size.

This image is first light with the Astro-Tech Coma Corrector.

Telescope: Orion 10" f/4.7 Newtonian and Astro-Tech Coma Corrector (eff. at f/5.17)
Camera and Exposure: Total 10.33 hrs thru SXVF-H9, 37x10'; SXVF-H9C, 25x10'
Filter: Hutech IDAS-LPS2
Guiding: SX Lodestar and SX OAG
Mount: Takahashi NJP
Software: Nebulosity, Maxim DL, Photoshop CS3
Location: The Woodlands, TX