Spring is the time for galaxies in the southern part of the sky and though we've had tremendous cloud cover, we finally had a nice stretch of clear weather. I was able to get out a few nights last week with a new camera (see notes below) and had a lot of fun shooting images at -15C with an entirely different setup. So, this is essentially "first light" for the new setup. I think M100 was a beautiful target, graced by a number of additional nearby galaxies. While appearing somewhat small in this image, consider that it is 107,000 light years across and contains 200,000 million solar masses. This is comparable to our own Milky Way galaxy. It's irregular spiral shape has been attributed to gravitational interactions with the nearby galaxies.
Photo Details May 6-7, 2015 Orion 8" Astrograph on VX Mount SBIG STF-8300C Camera Baader MPC Mark III Multi-Purpose Coma Corrector Skyglow filter 38 sub-frames at 3 minutes/frame Total Exposure Time = 1 hour 54 minutes Image Acquisition in CCDOps Image Stacking in Deep Sky Tracker Image Processing in PhotoShop
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