M96

[alan4908]

M96 is about 30 million light years away in the Leo constellation and is one of the sky’s brightest galaxies.  Studies indicate that the core may contain a super massive black hole.  It’s an asymmetric galaxy with weak spiral arms. The asymmetry is believed to be caused by gravitational distortions from other nearby galaxies.

I was pleased to see that considerable detail and colour was revealed towards the bright core, to maximise this I applied high dynamic range processing.   I also noticed an interesting feature of the outer spiral arms (about 10 o’clock position), however, this is actually a much more distant (700 million light years) spiral galaxy 2MFCG 8391 which is seen edge on.  Quite a few other background galaxies are also visible in the image, some of which have been identified in the annotated image below.

The LRGB image below was taken with my Esprit 150 and represents about 15 hours integration time.

Alan

 

Annotated

 

LIGHTS: L:36, R:17, G:19, B:20 x 600s all at -20C.