M97 - Owl Nebula and Quasars.

[Taman]

Planetary nebula located about 2000 light years from us in Ursa Major (The Great Bear).

Careful reprocess of data from May last year. I have also added a zoomed version to identify some interesting objects in the image.

There have been a few posts in the forums lately about capturing Quasars in amateur astro images. Little is known about these objects except that they are travelling at extreme speeds away from us, creating a Doppler effect which shifts light into the red spectrum (redshift). The interesting and mind-boggling thing are the vast distances Quasars are from us, over 1 billion light years. 

To put this into context, light travels approx 5.88 trillion miles in just 1 year!

I have identified 3 Quasars, (there are others visible in the main image) each between magnitude 19 and 20. The furthest is over 10 billion light years away, probably the most distant thing I have ever photographed.

Image processed with ASTAP, SiriL, Starnet++ and Photoshop.

Quasars researched with Aladin and NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database.

33 x 300s, with darks, flats and dark flats.

C11 at f6.3, ASI294MC Pro and Optolong L-Pro filter.

Thanks for looking!

Tony.

[Paul M]

Nice image and write-up.

I imaged the Owl recently but didn't go so deep, my first go at this object. I never even knew there were QSO's in the region. My QSO list so far, to the best of my knowledge is:

1. 3C 273

2. empty

3. empty

4....

[Taman]

3 minutes ago, Paul M said:

Nice image and write-up.

I imaged the Owl recently but didn't go so deep, my first go at this object. I never even knew there were QSO's in the region. My QSO list so far, to the best of my knowledge is:

1. 3C 273

2. empty

3. empty

4....

Thanks Paul! I found it fascinating to do. The tricky part was finding a database which gave the distances. I looked at the Hubble redshift equations and gave up! 😀

I may take another look at some of my other images.

Tony.

[vlaiv]

5 minutes ago, Taman said:

Thanks Paul! I found it fascinating to do. The tricky part was finding a database which gave the distances. I looked at the Hubble redshift equations and gave up! 😀

I may take another look at some of my other images.

Tony.

I'm rather interested to find out where you found the distance for 2MFGC 8778?

That is such a nice galaxy to try to "eyeball" the distance.

It looks like regular spiral galaxy of average size. As such - we could say it has about 120,000 Ly across (M31, NGC7331 sort of galaxy). Can we use that to get the distance?

According to measurement from your first image, pixel scale is 1.834"/px and galaxy is 17px across. If we take 120,000Ly across for that galaxy - we get 793MLy distance - very close to 760MLy that you quoted.

Science at work!

 

[Taman]

6 hours ago, vlaiv said:

I'm rather interested to find out where you found the distance for 2MFGC 8778?

Thanks for the science! It's nice to see it being roughly confirmed.

Just search for  2MFGC 8778 at https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/ to get all the measurements. The "light time" is under the redshifts tab.

You can also search for all objects within a set distance of  e.g. M97. I did this to find the Quasars. Some of the ID numbers are slightly different to the ones I quoted from Aladin, so searching directly for them will not find them.

Have fun! 😁

Tony

[Tan Zhi Qi]

Beautiful! Love the details!