Whats the furthest away thing you've imaged?

[Astro Waves]

Just curious on this one as I've currently got my camera going on NGC 4631 - Whale Nebula.

And it literally blew my tiny mind that it was 30 Mly away from us. I actually took a quick video on me phone of the computer screen and sent it to a few friends even though it was just the first single image I captured of it that was badly edited and looked like a small smudge, but it still blew my mind! Because of the moon phase I've got some shorter exposures going (80 secs) but its been going for at leat an 2 hours and I'll stay up an wait as well to see what happens!

[Craney]

Your mind might suffer an 'inflationary'  expansion  when I suggest that if you have a moderately sized scope and a half decent astro-camera you might have already imaged a Quasar or two.

It surprised me when I discovered a Quasar in a picture of M97  (Owl nebula) that was  over 8 BILLION light years away !!!!

 

 

[wimvb]

I'm currently working on the little pinwheel galaxy, ngc3184. In the same fov I have two galaxy clusters, one (aco 971) at 1.2 billion ly, the other at 3.6 billion ly. And then of course, there may be a few quasars in the image that are even further away, as @Craney already wrote about. Ngc 3184 itself is at 40 million ly.

[gorann]

If you get your camera going long enough at the Hamburger galaxy you have a good chance of catching quasars that are more than 10 Giga ly away:

http://www.waid-observatory.com/ngc3628-2016-03-31-quasars.html

I just about managed to do it with a 5" refractor and a DSLR in 3 hours:

https://www.astrobin.com/288366/

[drjolo]

I do not hunt specifically for quasars, but quite often scan my existing images for distant objects. I have found objects over 12 billion light years away three times already. 

First one is in the M105 galaxy trio area. It is SDSS J104718.26+130318.6 quasar 12 billion years http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr9/en/tools/explore/obj.asp?id=1237661068716474941 :

Another one is close to NGC4244 galaxy - SDSS J121510.36+375811.2 - http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr13/en/tools/explore/Summary.aspx?id=1237664338792350092 - 12.4 billion years:

And another 12.4 billion years target - http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr14/en/tools/explore/Summary.aspx?id=1237661417138094494 - next to M101:

First image was captured with 8" newtonian and Atik383, another two with 130mm refractor and QHY163M camera under suburban sky. 

[Paul M]

My best is still 3C 273, imaged last spring.

Will try again soon.

[Owmuchonomy]

At 8 billion LY distant, the sudden brightening in 2016 of a Quasar (CTA-102) in Pegasus is probably the most distant visual target I have shared with visitors to the obsy.  Attached is an image captured too.

Edited March 25, 2021 by Owmuchonomy

[Astro Waves]

I read through all this about 3 time just trying to take it all in! Those are some pretty big distances from everyone! I bloody love space, well I do now. It used to really freak me out thinking how big it is and could only watch space programs for about 10 minutes before going into my own internal void os despair......but I got over that and now can't get enough of learning about it.

Whats the best way to analyse an image to see what you have in it apart from the target you're actually amazing for? 

[wimvb]

7 hours ago, Astro Waves said:

Whats the best way to analyse an image to see what you have in it apart from the target you're actually amazing for?

You can plate solve an image at astrometry.net. For identification, I use Simbad or Aladin

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

https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml

[ollypenrice]

23 hours ago, gorann said:

If you get your camera going long enough at the Hamburger galaxy you have a good chance of catching quasars that are more than 10 Giga ly away:

http://www.waid-observatory.com/ngc3628-2016-03-31-quasars.html

I just about managed to do it with a 5" refractor and a DSLR in 3 hours:

https://www.astrobin.com/288366/

This is precisely the post I was about to make. The Hamburger is a happy hunting ground for quasars. (This was pointed out to me by Greg Parker when I posted a deep Triplet image some years ago. My thanks to him.)

Olly

[Clarkey]

I have just had a look at my 'Hamburger' and found one of the quasars at 10.5 Gly away. That's 3/4 of the age of the universe! I then thought about it a bit more and my brain melted🤣

[emyliano2000]

I found out that in my m106 photo I have a 19.5 magnitude quasar, 12Gly away. 

Annotated in white. 

Emil

[Knight of Clear Skies]

I've managed to just about catch mag 19 quasars at over 10 billion ly with just a DSLR and camera lens, when imaging the Virgo cluster.

[Paul M]

I've been looking forward to this spring since last spring, hoping to capture some distant objects. Point sources are better suited to my EEVA style of imaging.

Unfortunately the Weather and Moon have other ideas

Anyway, 12 Billion L/y? My father used to deliver milk further than that..! 🤣

[Owmuchonomy]

It's a great topic for our visitors, and then I start explaining the (original source) wavelength of the light captured in these images by our mundane camera sensors and what that means. Minds blown!

[tomato]

Great thread! I’m currently attempting to image the 3C 273 jet, no luck so far with one hour’s integration...

[old_eyes]

I haven’t set out to image any quasars, but following this thread I might check out some of my images for evidence.

what I have done is visually observed 3C273 with a 250mm Skywatcher Dob. At 2.4 Gly and mag 12.9 it is not the furthest or the faintest, but it does provoke a gasp when you find it and realise what you are looking at.

[Astro Waves]

13 hours ago, wimvb said:

You can plate solve an image at astrometry.net. For identification, I use Simbad or Aladin

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

https://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/aladin.gml

Nice, I'll give that look. I'm still new to plate solving and still haven't really figured it out yet but I'll get there.....at some point.

 

2 hours ago, Clarkey said:

I have just had a look at my 'Hamburger' and found one of the quasars at 10.5 Gly away. That's 3/4 of the age of the universe! I then thought about it a bit more and my brain melted🤣

Well you're not messing around there are you. That's a fair old distance.

Side topic, I did post this is imaging discussion but its also very appropriate here seen as how no one answered it yet. Do the imaging settings need to be the same when imaging on multiple nights? I've managed to get two nights on the Whale galaxy but with different exposure times. They are also slightly framed different mainly because I'm not using a go-to mount and bloody hell, trying to line up nearly the same took me about an hour last night because the changes are so minute. 

This is my first time trying to get more than one nights data on one target which is exciting. I accidentally got NGC 4244 (Caldwell 26 galaxy) in my sights before getting to the whale which was cool as well but then decided to persist on the Whale seen as how these things aren't going any where.

When I very first thought and started AP I was so excited about capturing nebula (which I've only done semi successfully yet) but so far I've been way more excited about capturing galaxies. I'll post a pic when I can finally get everything stacked and sorted which I've been having a bit of trouble with.

 

 

[Xilman]

7 minutes ago, Astro Waves said:

Side topic, I did post this is imaging discussion but its also very appropriate here seen as how no one answered it yet. Do the imaging settings need to be the same when imaging on multiple nights? I've managed to get two nights on the Whale galaxy but with different exposure times. They are also slightly framed different ...

Nope, none of exposure times, exposure dates and field centres need be the same.  To see the latter to be true, consider the number of mosaics that are out there: overlapping images which have been stitched together. All you need is co-adding software which can correctly position the subs. Personally I plate-solve first and then use SWarp to stack the subs. SWarp reads the co-ordinate system from the individually solved subs.

SWarp also handles the multiple exposure time issues by weighting each sub by its exposure before co-adding.

Do you get the idea that I really like SWarp?

[Astro Waves]

Soooooooo SWarp then? haha. I'll have a look into it but taking me forever to even just get to grips with stacking software. 

I need to get on this plate solving business would make life much easier but same applies as above about software.

[tomato]

 

1 hour ago, Astro Waves said:

 

When I very first thought and started AP I was so excited about capturing nebula (which I've only done semi successfully yet) but so far I've been way more excited about capturing galaxies. I'll post a pic when I can finally get everything stacked and sorted which I've been having a bit of trouble with.

 

 

 Nice to see someone else who gets more fired up by imaging galaxies rather than nebulae.  I really like to search nebula free images for the myriad of far distant galaxies you can often see in the background ('faint fuzzies' is too demeaning a description for them IMHO). 

When the HST images an object in a  'clear' part of the sky you can almost guarantee there will be a host of distant galaxies visible in the background, it really is mind blowing stuff.

 

[Astro Waves]

Some one very kindly did me a small walk through of Siril and I've got two nights worth of data sorted and I did it properly with actually using calibration frames for the first time (I know I know) and even without editing, it outputted the image and I said holy f**k about 6 times, its by no means the most detailed image of the Whale Galaxy but for my first proper go at one over two nights shooting I'm super pleased! I think I'm going to try a bit more galaxy hunting as well. Might need a larger hard drive though, had to make so much space for Siril to be able to process it.

I'll post a piccy once I've done a good edit.

[Paul M]

5 hours ago, tomato said:

Great thread! I’m currently attempting to image the 3C 273 jet, no luck so far with one hour’s integration...

I posted about such a project last year. Something I'm hoping to have a go at now It's back in the sky at a sensible time. 

It is a difficult subject but there are a few amateur images of the jet out there on Google. It gives me some hope  

My concern is that although the jet is certainly large enough to resolve easily, it'll need a lot of integration and will be lost in the glare and bloat of the Quasar. 

[Astro Waves]

So the Whale Galaxy is now my furthest away object I've intentionally imaged at 30 Mly.

I may have gone a tad too hard on the saturation but not bad either way, I said holy f**k after every stretch and levels the more details that came out. I'll have another go at editing it tomorrow but otherwise, super happy with it. I tell you what, people weren't wrong saying calibration frames make a big difference. 

I think there's a total of 2:20 of integration time maybe. I might keep going on it as well. Let me know what you think. 

Edited March 26, 2021 by Astro Waves

[Macavity]

Aside from not too difficult (DOT-like!) 3C273, the "Hubble Deep Field".
- Or rather the "faintest" and (in this case) not too attractive an image? 🥳
Most of effort was in finding (multi-step EEVA star hopping) the thing...