Finally had a nice clear, dark and cold night perfect for astrophotography. I found M106 in the eastern sky and this image is composed of 38 frames at 300 seconds each making an integrated total of 3 hours and 10 minutes. This was a very good long run with some nice tracking. 

This galaxy is 24 million light years away and it is one of the closest galaxies with a super massive black hole at the core. It became an important object for calibrating distances in space because of unique properties. This gets way to technical for me to follow but it has a rich history in astrophysics and deep space research.

From the net:

“Today, astronomers know that the power source is a disk of hot gas around a supermassive black hole. And one of the nearest of these “Seyfert galaxies” is M106, at a distance of just 24 million light-years.

Astronomers have used radio telescopes to draw a detailed map of the galaxy’s accretion disk. Water molecules at the edge of the disk are pumped up by the disk’s energy, creating bright spots known as masers. The masers trace the disk’s size (about two light-years in diameter) and its motion around the central black hole (speeds of about one million miles per hour at the outer edge of the disk). The masers also show that the disk is warped like the brim of a hat, which one side turned up a little, and the other turned down.

From the masers and the motions of stars near the core, astronomers have measured the mass of the black hole at roughly 24 million to 38 million times the mass of the Sun.

Magnetic fields generated by the rapidly spinning disk accelerate some of its hot gas to almost the speed of light and shoot it back into space in the form of two jets, which produce radio waves and other forms of energy. The disks shoot out into space from the black hole’s poles, so they are perpendicular to the plane of the disk.”

Prior image from 2020

Known as the Deer Lick Group, this cropped in image came from two and a half hours of total integration time with 300 second sub frames. Good conditions with dark sky, no wind and very good tracking. I can find at least 15 galaxies visible in this image!

I have done this one before but I am always hoping to get better results in some way. Too bad I missed the Aurora the very next night…..

From the web:

“NGC 7331 Group is a visual grouping of galaxies in the constellation Pegasus. Spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is a foreground galaxy in the same field as the collection, which is also called the Deer Lick Group.”

“BTW, the odd moniker Deer Lick Group, by which this collection of galaxies is affectionately known, was coined by Tomm Lorenzin, author of 1000+ The Amateur Astronomer’s Field Guide to Deep Sky Observing, “in commemoration of one of the finest nights of viewing EVER, at Deer Lick Gap, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway”

“At 40 million light years distance, it is a bright and dusty spiral galaxy that is thought to maybe be a “twin” of our home Milky Way galaxy. It is one of the brighter galaxies we can observe at magnitude 10.4.  Stephan’s Quintet is a group of four interacting galaxies (Visually nearby on the right hand side of this image).

A dark night turning to a small target that I have not worked on before. Unfortunately my computer must have rebooted after a while and I lost half of the nights capture time. This image is compiled from 1 and a half hours of 200 second exposures after discarding around eight poor subs.

        “The Propeller Galaxy (NGC 7479) is a barred spiral galaxy located about 105 million light-years away from Earth in the northern constellation of Pegasus”

Even with limited data, I am intrigued to see some detail in the crop image.

Two galaxies near the Andromeda galaxy that are rather faint and not very remarkable except for their proximity in the sky. A very warm night did not help the camera digital noise level. Image compiled of 240 second subs with 2 hours and 52 minutes total time.

From the Web:

“NGC 147 is a dwarf spheroidal galaxy about 2.58 Mly away in the constellation Cassiopeia. NGC 147 is a member of the Local group of galaxies and a satellite galaxy of the Andromeda Galaxy. It forms a physical pair with the nearby galaxy NGC 185”