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
3 comments:
That's the best M106 I've ever seen outside of the big observatories!
Thanks, Rory! That's about the nicest comment I've received on an image. I'm pretty pleased with the detail. The night I took luminance, seeing was an 8 of 10 (for Houston) from 9 pm to 11 pm, then went to a 10 of 10 for about three hours as the galaxy passed the zenith. The next night seeing was lousy, but by then I was only shooting color. The thing the image lacks chiefly is contrast, but that's hard to come by in the 'burbs. Also, the light pollution dulls the blue, so it's harder to separate the spiral arms from the skyglow. I thought of sending you the data to see if you could get more from it (as you usually do). Interested?
Definitely! Send me an email and we'll coordinate.
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