Comet and Galaxy

[Paul81]

Clear nights on a sunday seem to becoming a regular at the moment - I am not complaining!

The following were captured with SX Lodestar-M, LL work in progress V0.11, AA6RC and an Astronomik CLS filter (the usual). All images are exactly as seen at the telescope.

Although well covered on the forum, here is my take on Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques. It is quite bright and is visible in very short exposures used for star hopping. The picture below is from 30s exposures (7x) median stacked. It will be interesting to see how and if the comet changes appearance over the coming months.

The main focus of the session was Hickson 56, framed with NGC3718 and NGC3729. Both the foreground galaxies NGC3718 (bottom) and NGC3729 (top) are interacting, with the formers spiral arms being warped by the other. I think some of the sweet wrapper shape of NGC3718 is showing in the capture. The two galaxies are about 150,000 LY apart - which is very close considering the Milky Way is about 100,000 LY across. Both galaxies have some nice deep dust lanes through the middle which is coming through on the picture. The galaxies are about 52 MLY away.

To the left of NGC 3718 is the galaxy group Hickson 56. This is a group of 5 galaxies some 400 MLY distant. Four of the five are interacting, with the 5th being the edge on spiral (the top one of the vertical chain in the image).

Such a fascinating image - two sets of interacting galaxies in one shot! 

To round the evening off a quick hope over to Perseus to Messier 76 - The little Dumbbell nebula. This has the fame of being the trickiest messier to observe, and one I have never spotted visually to any tangible degree. I might re-visit this one with the VX10 and longer exposures.

It was also nice to try out the latest code mods on the same day I wrote them! The work in progress V0.11 has the first wave of display processing updates, mainly the improved histogram stretch and the non-linear display processing. This works very well on galaxies. I did notice a bug when I was using it though (I rushed optimised the new code into SIMD assembler and I must have messed the maths up as under some circumstances it was incorrectly clipping the histogram). I'll put some more on all this though on another post!

[nytecam]

Well done Paul - you've also captured v.faint PGC 2432563 + 2423714 and I'm sure others too

[Martin Meredith]

Great results. I love the Hickson shot!

BTW I was after some Hicksons last night under very severe LP (sky quality measure of 17.05 which is equivalent to naked-eye limited magnitude of 3.14) just for the hell of it. The image was so washed out that LL refused to stack (FWHM in the range of 40-60!!) but even so 3 of Seyfert's Sextet were clear and with some imagination maybe more. Just for fun this screenshot shows the extent of the LP problem (labelled inset from SkySafari):

I guess the moral is that no matter how bad the LP is (and you could read a book by this) you can still look for faint fuzzies.... and gain around 11 magnitudes re. naked eye in this case.

Martin