M106 and Friends (LOTS of Friends if You Look Hard Enough!)

[Mike Lewis]

So I am heading into galaxy season now armed only with my 4" refractor, so I am starting to find whatever targets I can. Here is a wider view that includes M106, the main spiral galaxy dominating the view here, along with a handful of other smaller galaxies. This image was surprisingly hard to edit to my liking, and I eventually just decided to post this version. I actually threw out my original data set completely, as I think it was 'overexposed' and I shot this again at a lower gain and with shorter subs. Even so, the bright stars do not look good, so much so that the worst offenders have been cropped off the bottom of this image, which is why NGC 4217 has ended up uncomfortably close to the edge of the frame. This is proof that not every astro image can be a masterpeice, and makes me think that in all the work I have put in during the last year to get my narrowband processing to a certain level I have managed to lose my recipe for processing RGB data. Always something new to learn (or re-learn) it seems like, but that is what keeps the hobby fresh. Comments, critiques, and suggestions welcome, as always.

Here is the image:

And here is an annotated version, showing the other NGC galaxies in the frame.

And believe it or not, if I turn on the PGC catalog objects (PGC stands for Principal Galaxies Catalog and contains entries for over 73,000 galaxies!), there are many many more small dots that are also galaxies and not stars, visible in the image:

It starts to TRULY boggle the mind and fire the imagination when you realize each marked spot is an entire galaxy, and we are only looking at a small patch of sky in this image


Capture details and some more info on M106 from Wikipedia:

Equipment:
ZWO ASI1600MM-C Camera @ -15C and
Gain:0 Offset:10
Software Bisque MyT Mount
Stellarvue SVQ100 Astrograph Refractor, 580mm @ f/5.8

Software:
Pixinsight Commercial Version 1.8
Lightroom CC
Photoshop CC

Light Frames:
Luminance: 205 x 30 secs (1 hr 42 mins 30 secs)
Red:111 x 60 secs (1 hr 51 mins)
Green:105 x 60 secs (1 hr 45 mins)
Blue: 105 x 60 secs (1 hr 45 mins)


7 hrs 3 mins total

Dark Frames:
10 x 30 secs, RGB (5 mins)
10 x 60 secs, Luminance (10 mins)
Bias Frames
60

Flat Frames
10 each filter

More M106 Details from Wikipedia:
Messier 106 (also known as NGC 4258) is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781. M106 is at a distance of about 22 to 25 million light-years away from Earth. M106 contains an active nucleus classified as a Type 2 Seyfert, and the presence of a central supermassive black hole has been demonstrated from radio-wavelength observations of the rotation of a disk of molecular gas orbiting within the inner light-year around the black hole.

ML

 

[AlanLichty]

The annotated versions are a bit hard to wrap my head around given the number of galaxies in the catalog and those are just the ones we know about

Neat image.

 

[chuckp]

Nice shot Mike, it is amazing on how many galaxies there are out there.

 

[JimFox]

Hey Mike, this is really great. It is amazing to think just how many galaxies there are out there.

Is NGC 4217 the Cheeseburger Nebula? It’s got a very cool look no matter what.

Personally as great as all of these are, I don’t take any of them as masterpieces. If there is one thing I have learned so far in my short Deep Space Astro life, is that each time you image an object it will look different then the previous time, usually for the better but not always. And of course none of mine would be thought in terms of a masterpiece, but rather that they are Okay. So when my Astro has flaws and isn’t perfect, for me that’s the norm.

 

[Ben Egbert]

Great shot and great info.