M105 and other disappointing galaxies

[alacant]

Hi everyone. Just a heads up if anyone else is thinking of going here with affordable equipment. After the M65 trio, I had high hopes of this adjacent group. <self pity>Disappointment. I wish I'd spent the time on a proper galaxy.</self pity> I reckon this would need 3 or 4 times the snaps to get any detail. Cheers and clear skies.

 

[DeepSkyBagger]

What's wrong with that? Nice wide-field view, and you've also captured M96. 

[gonzostar]

Wow wish i could get pics like that  

[triton1]

I'm liking it a lot nice wide field view?

[alacant]

Thanks everyone for looking and your comments. I think I've been spoiled by the wealth of targets through the winter. The sky looks barren by comparison ATM. All there seems to be are galaxies. Loads of them! At around 800mm focus, my telescope is neither here nor there. Maybe it's just me...

[Uranium235]

Yeah, youre quite right - elliptical galaxies are a bit boring for us imagers

If you use an up to date version of stellarium, that will tell you what type of galaxy youre looking at when researching targets. Usually the interesting ones are spiral, barred spiral or irregular. Here is a diagram to help you out:

[alacant]

18 minutes ago, Uranium235 said:

spiral, barred spiral or irregular

Ah, OK, thanks. I'm ignorant when it comes to this sort of stuff and admit to expecting all galaxies to be spiral and thought there'd be stuff like the heart and soul all year round. Until last night and this confirmation. 

Tonight it was m109. Still not very inspiring as it looks dwarfed in the fov of my 800mm fl telescope. At least it looks a bit sprial...

[wimvb]

Try some NGC galaxies. NGC 2903 in Leo is a barred spiral. NGC 2403 in Camelopardalis also.

Before you choose a target, you can always look it up in DSO browser or Google, to see what size it is. Then compare to the more well known like M51.

Many galaxies are either small (= far away), or faint (face on, like M101).

 

Happy hunting

[laser_jock99]

The other thing about galaxies is they are (mostly) very small and benefit from using a telescope with a long focal length to get any kind of image scale (we are talking 1200mm FL+). But along with that you get other problems like slow focal ratio, much harder to guide etc. ect.....

[PeterCPC]

You think that you have issues - what about this for a Leo Triplet. The sky conditions were not kind to me.

Peter

[SteveNickolls]

17 hours ago, alacant said:

Hi everyone. Just a heads up if anyone else is thinking of going here with affordable equipment. After the M65 trio, I had high hopes of this adjacent group. <self pity>Disappointment. I wish I'd spent the time on a proper galaxy.</self pity> I reckon this would need 3 or 4 times the snaps to get any detail. Cheers and clear skies.

Hi, 

I wouldn't be so hard on yourself or your gear. You've been able to capture galaxies that would be rather faint and tiny through a telescope or not visible at all. Well done.

Cheers,
Steve

[alacant]

1 hour ago, laser_jock99 said:

they are (mostly) very small and benefit from using a telescope with a long focal length

+1. This maybe a case of mothballing until summer and wait for the likes of Cygnus with some proper stuff to have a go at. There really doesn't seem anything worthwhile at a reasonable image scale ATM. 

A little (sic) justification was this grab of m109 last night. Hey, a barred spiral but just look how small it is. Even the satellites decided to make their mark. Then there's the spikes from that bright plough star... Just about sums up my feelings!

 

[alacant]

1 hour ago, PeterCPC said:

what about this for a Leo Triplet

Hi. It looks OK from here. You must have something more powerful so at least it doesn't look like a mistake in the middle of an empty frame. Good.

[IanL]

Don't be too disheartened.  80mm isn't great for tiny galaxies, but intermediate ones are perfectly doable.  To be honest the main thing you are lacking is colour which you can probably bring out through better processing; mainly trying to increase the saturation whilst achieving a reasonable colour balance.

This is an ASI1600MM-C LRGB through an ED80 (about 3.6 hours total exposure).  Some might consider it a bit too much on the blue side to be true to life, but it makes for a striking shot.  I could probably improve it by going back and working harder on the stars which are rather desaturated.

This one is a DSLR (Canon 500D) and ED80 effort at M101, total exposure is 5 hours. Again I've tried to pull out and separate the blue and the yellow/orange/red tones.  Both images processed entirely in PixInsight.  The stars are better in this one, despite having to deal with DSLR colour fringes that tend to throw things out.

[alacant]

Hi. Thanks for the encouragement. I've 208mm and yes, the larger spirals are not too bad. Here are my attempts, around 60 minutes each. It's just that once you've done them, there's precious little else. I suppose as always I should try longer exposures...

**Edit: and learn how to incorporate flat frames...

 

[MattJenko]

It might not fit what you want to achieve with your imaging, but you could try going for a significantly larger amount of integration time for your existing targets. Doing an hour on each of them and marking them as done is one approach, doing multiple sessions on the same target and aiming for 9 hours+ to see the difference would be another.

[DeepSkyBagger]

You bunch of whingers! From your suburban back gardens, you're obtaining images with more and fainter detail with tiny telescopes than even the largest telescope in the world could achieve when I started out in astronomy in the mid 70s. You should see some of our truly pathetic efforts from then!

Cheer up, you don't know you're born! 

[johnrt]

I must have stumbled in to the wrong thread as I can't see anything disappointing here.....  

[wimvb]

1 hour ago, johnrt said:

I must have stumbled in to the wrong thread as I can't see anything disappointing here.....  

Me neither. But if the op wants to fill the frame with a galaxy, a smaller chip is the answer. It won't improve anything (unless the pixelsize is equally smaller), but it will fill the whole frame. A cheaper solution is to drizzle and crop.

My personal choice would be to fill the rest of the frame with an interesting star field and/or fuzzies.

8 hours ago, alacant said:

+1. This maybe a case of mothballing until summer and wait for the likes of Cygnus with some proper stuff to have a go at. There really doesn't seem anything worthwhile at a reasonable image scale ATM. 

 

Nebulae are mainly Milky Way objects. During the periods between the MW being over head, there will be fewer of these. Otoh, the absence of dense star fields makes anything beyond the MW easier to observe/image.

[frugal]

If you ever feel despondent about your astronomy imaging, just remember this: you are taking a photograph of something that happened 35,000,000 years ago, 200,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away...