A few galaxies ...

[lukebl]

Hi all,

Here's a few lesser-seen galaxies I've captured recently whilst attempting (and failing dismally) to cure the egg-shaped stars in my images. I know it's nothing to do with the guiding and everything to do with the cam/focuser/secondary alignment which just won't co-operate.

Here is NGC 4395, a big but faint and diffuse sprial galaxy in Canes venatici. It's so faint that this is the result of 9 hours exposure, plus around 2.5 for the colour! It's a combination of 5 & 10 minute luminance exposures with my SXVF-H9 cam and 250mm f/4.7 Newt. The colour came from 30 x 5 min exposures with a Canon 450d. It's one of our nearer galactic neighbours and according to old friend Wikipedia 'NGC 4395 is notable in that it contains one of the smallest supermassive black hole ever discovered. The central black hole has a mass of "only" 300,000 sun masses.'

And here's a very nice little triplet which I stumbled on in Leo Minor. From left to right: NGC 3430, 3424 and 3413, with loads of faint fuzzies in between. About 35 x 5 min exposures with my SXVF-H9 cam and 250mm f/4.7 Newt. No RGB.

[Gina]

A fortunate capture indeed - brill

[Quatermass]

Lovely set of galaxy's Luke, impressive.

[Ponoobersie]

Wow very nice! The mind boggles at the size of that Black Hole....how big again?!?!? Blimy!

[angusb1]

Nice! How did you combine the colour from the DSLR with the luminance from the CCD? Also did you use the same scope for both?

[Cloudwatcher]

Like them both but especially the first.........never seen that before.

[lukebl]

Thanks a lot, guys

Nice! How did you combine the colour from the DSLR with the luminance from the CCD? Also did you use the same scope for both?

Yes, same scope. I just scaled and aligned (rather crudely) the DSLR image in Photoshop and made it the colour layer. Here's the full DSLR image. Very faint and noisy, as you see, but managed at least to give a bit of colour to the image.

[foundaplanet]

Very much like the second image. Multiple galaxy images take some beating for me.