Messier 77 - a galaxy in Cetus

Messier 77, a spiral galaxy in Cetus. Click to enlarge. About 30 minutes exposure.

This galaxy is about 50 million light-years away. At the core of M77 is a well-studied massive and active black hole of at least 100 million solar masses.

Leo 1: a local group galaxy

Leo 1 is a dwarf galaxy located about 800,000 light years away in the constellation Leo. In fact, you can nearly pinpoint the location of the galaxy with your naked eye by looking at the bright blueish star Regulus. (You can find Regulus, if you don't know many constellations, by looking at the Big Dipper. Know the pointer stars on the bowl that point to Polaris? If you go backwards from them, they point to Regulus). Regulus is only a 1/3 a degree away from this galaxy, and its glare is always in the way. Take a look at this fantastic image from Russell Croman

Occasionally slightly crazy, I decided to attempt to image this galaxy last Friday. The moon had just risen and it was slightly hazy. In other words, I was completely crazy.


About 45 minutes exposure. Click to enlarge


It's tough to see, but look at the slightly knobbier noise just to the bottom right of center. Compared that to the noise in the rest of the image. You can use the two stars in the upper left to compare the frame with this image from Wikipedia/Digital Sky Survey/STScI:



I definitely need to get some better flats made.

A gorgeous galactic grauve

Actually not a grauve, but an image:


Make sure you look at the largest image you can comfortably download, and enjoy the relation of the size of the background galaxies to the foreground one. A true sense of the Universe.

From Bad Astronomy.

Mirach's Ghost

NGC 404 near Mirach. Click to enlarge

Continuing my Black Friday imaging blitz, I came across this galaxy while recalibrating the telescope's setting circles on Mirach, a bright star in Andromeda. I was making sure they were as accurate as possible while heading to the quasar 3C 48. On such a bright star a CCD image will show beautiful diffraction spikes and a gradient of grays that to me are nearly the best thing out there. So while taking some images for that one of the stars looked a bit fuzzy, and sure enough NGC 404 popped out. Phil Plait has a nice post about it, and that post was the push to complete this round of processing.

The Antennae galaxy from Chicago

I am guessing that the Astronomy Picture of the Day for tomorrow, with the title "cosmic antennae", is likely to be about the Antennae Galaxy, an interacting pair 63 million light-years away in Corvus the Crow, visible now as a compact quadrilateral to the far lower-right of Jupiter blazing in the south after sunset. So, I'm posting a poor image of them now, because otherwise the APOD gets me every time in posting something I should have posted earlier.

I imaged the Antennae (also known as NGC 4038/4039) on April 26th from Ryerson Observatory. The total exposure time was about 85 minutes. My light-polluted skies overwhelmed the faint antennae structure of stars thrown out of the galaxies during the collision. I can see the individual superclusters of bright blue supergiants formed during intense starbirths from the compression of gas clouds during the collison. The two brightest knots in the galaxy (oriented roughly vertical in my image) are actually the cores of the original pre-collision galaxies.

Any variations in the dark gray background are dust donuts from the telescope, and leftovers of a smoothing feature I used to help get rid of the vignetting. My flats were not good enough to use for this processing.