My galaxy season started last night - cought my first 23

[gorann]

Here are NGC5216, 5218, 5205 and at least twenty more galaxies, from last night. I really like the violent interaction that appears to be going on between the first two. The data is from both my Esprit 150 with ASI071 (sitting on my Mesu) and my Meade 14" (ACF) on the EQ8 with my newly modded Sony A7s. The Meade data is helping out on the three NGC galaxies in the centre.

This is my first galaxy image of the season and first time I got my head around using the Sony A7s (just Ha modded by JTW - not that Ha was needed for this image). It is a full frame big pixel (8.4 µm) mirror-less DSLR that is supposed to be the most light sensitive one ever made by Sony. My hope is that it will be a relatively good match for the 3.55 meters of focal length of the Meade SCT (although still oversampling at 0.49 "/ pixel). However, it seems like I will have to run it with an intervallometer (which is low-tech and fine with me) since I never got the Sony capture program on my laptop to do what I wanted it to do, which wasted a few hours of imaging time last night.

I am really surprised how well my old EQ8 handles the 40+ kg of SCT. Last night guiding RMS was sometimes even below 0.4 "/pixel. I think it got good help from the Lodestar X2 on the OAG, so I just bought another Lodestar X2 to give the Mesu mount the same treat soon.

I also post the annotated image (from PI) suggesting that there are at least 23 galaxies in there.

Totally about 8 hours of data.

Comments most welcome of course!

EDIT - I now also added the image from the 14" SCT.

 

 

 

Edited February 27, 2020 by gorann

[wimvb]

Nice start of the galaxy season, Göran. 

27 minutes ago, gorann said:

I also post the annotated image (from PI) suggesting that there are at least 23 galaxies in there.

PI isn't particularly good at finding all the galaxies, so you may well have triple that number of galaxies in your image

[Firas]

Lovely image Göran! 

Indeed a violent interaction, yet quite distant. Apparently, this galactic bridge spans 22 light years!  A Cosmic handshake! 

[gorann]

34 minutes ago, wimvb said:

Nice start of the galaxy season, Göran. 

PI isn't particularly good at finding all the galaxies, so you may well have triple that number of galaxies in your image

Thanks Wim! Yes, I see more galaxies in there.

[gorann]

35 minutes ago, Firas said:

Lovely image Göran! 

Indeed a violent interaction, yet quite distant. Apparently, this galactic bridge spans 22 light years!  A Cosmic handshake! 

Thanks a lot Firas! You forgot to add three zeros. I now added the image from the big SCT, clearly showing those 22 000 light years of galactic bridge.

[wimvb]

24 minutes ago, gorann said:

Thanks Wim! Yes, I see more galaxies in there.

The galaxy marked pgc 2640520 is the brightest member of a galaxy cluster, consisting of some 28 galaxies. Most of the reddish fuzzy pixels surrounding that galaxy are its sibblings.

And just for kicks: that galaxy has a redshift of 0.219, putting it at a distance of about 2.9 billion light years.

[Firas]

 

32 minutes ago, gorann said:

You forgot to add three zeros.

I was meaning to write 22 thousands, but it escaped me  

Will have a look! 

[gorann]

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

The galaxy marked pgc 2640520 is the brightest member of a galaxy cluster, consisting of some 28 galaxies. Most of the reddish fuzzy pixels surrounding that galaxy are its sibblings.

And just for kicks: that galaxy has a redshift of 0.219, putting it at a distance of about 2.9 billion light years.

That is food for thoughts! I did notice those brown things in that area when I was processing and thought I would have to give the big SCT a good clean🤪. By the way - where did you find that info?

Edited February 27, 2020 by gorann

[wimvb]

Simbad, at the university of Strasbourg

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-fcoo

I got much info on those faintest of fuzzies when I posted a galaxy image on astronet.se

[gorann]

52 minutes ago, wimvb said:

Simbad, at the university of Strasbourg

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-fcoo

I got much info on those faintest of fuzzies when I posted a galaxy image on astronet.se

I should check Simbad more often. I think I acually often do it since I think Aladin Sky Atlas i hocked up to it.

[Xplode]

Nice image Göran!
There's probably a few thousand galaxies in there if you count the faint yellow ones in the background.

[don4l]

Lovely image.  I especially like the "bridge".

ASTAP shows about 150 galaxies in your image from the Hyperleda database which are clearly visible. 

 

[gorann]

16 hours ago, Xplode said:

Nice image Göran!
There's probably a few thousand galaxies in there if you count the faint yellow ones in the background.

Thanks Ole Aleksander! Yes you are of course right. Actually, when thinking about it wherever we point our scopes there will allways be uncountable numbers of galaxies behind the ones with names or numbers. 

Edited February 28, 2020 by gorann

[wimvb]

5 minutes ago, gorann said:

Thanks Ole Aleksander! Yes you are of course right. Actually, when thinking about it wherever we point our scopes there will allways be uncountable numbers of galaxies behind the ones with names or numbers. 

But only those that are visible in the final image count, of course. 

[gorann]

16 hours ago, don4l said:

Lovely image.  I especially like the "bridge".

ASTAP shows about 150 galaxies in your image from the Hyperleda database which are clearly visible. 

 

Thanks Don!

Have to find out what the Hyperleda data base is.....

[gorann]

Just now, wimvb said:

But only those that are visible in the final image count, of course. 

Thanks Wim, good to know!

[Xplode]

2 hours ago, wimvb said:

But only those that are visible in the final image count, of course. 

There's a lot more visible galaxies in images like these than people think, most of them are just so far away that they look like faint yellow stars, don't they count as galaxies too?

 

Here's 1500+ galaxies annotated down to mag 20, there's still fainter objects there....

Edited February 28, 2020 by Xplode

[don4l]

3 hours ago, gorann said:

Thanks Don!

Have to find out what the Hyperleda data base is.....

It's just another catalogue.  The ASTAP download page has instructions for downloading and using it.  No special knowledge required.

[gorann]

On 28/02/2020 at 19:40, Xplode said:

There's a lot more visible galaxies in images like these than people think, most of them are just so far away that they look like faint yellow stars, don't they count as galaxies too?

 

Here's 1500+ galaxies annotated down to mag 20, there's still fainter objects there....

Amazing - more galaxies than stars!