We had a beautiful night at the Test Track to capture this image. Unfortunately, we did have some high clouds that seemed to have caused a bit of streaking. Despite that, I was pretty happy overall with the image. It represented my longest continuous run to date at nearly 4 total hours of exposure time. We also had a lot of fun looking for and seeing a few meteors as we got deeper into the night.
The main event in the photo is Messier 90 which is a face-on spiral galaxy somewhere between 30 and 65 million light years from us. I love the well-defined structure of the arms swirling about the bright core. Astronomers have determined about 2 new stars are born in the core every year, so it's a stellar nursery of sorts.
The second largest, and much less dramatic, object in the image is another galaxy, M89. Clearly outdone by the grand spiral design of its neighbor, this seemingly inconspicuous galaxy is 74,000 light years in diameter and hosts a super massive central object of a thousand million solar masses, which is probably a black hole.
The third largest object, I believe, is IC 3606. This is yet another galaxy found the galaxy-rich constellation of Virgo.
Photo Details
May 23, 2014
Orion 8" Astrograph on VX Mount
Nikon D3100 Camera - ISO 1600
Baader MPC Mark III Multi-Purpose Coma Corrector
Skyglow filter
Autoguider
78 sub-frames at 3.0 minutes/frame
Total Exposure Time = 3 hours 54 minutes
Image Stacking in Deep Sky Tracker
Image Processing in PhotoShop
The memory I have of the night this photo was taken involved a delightful date night including dinner, and catching up to you in our messier catalogue...all while I "steered" the BIG telescope! An amazing night, with a beautiful image to prove it!
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