Galaxies

Limited Results

December 30th was an unexpectedly cloudless night with a new Moon. Clear conditions were too good to pass up. I knew it would be the last opportunity to use Seestar for a while, so I set out to capture a few galaxy targets on my observing list. Initially annoying neighbor lights were eventually turned off.

Seestar's ability to produce good galaxy images is limited, especially for small dim galaxies. The 50mm aperture is a small light bucket, and, in my particular case, bright background sky prevents capture of faint detail. Exposures longer than about 30 minutes don't seem to yield more detail. (All images shown below are 30-minute exposures.) Seestar's field of view is too large for smaller galaxies which call for more magnification. Nevertheless, Seestar reveals much more than my eyeball can ever perceive at the eyepiece of my telescopes. In spite of Seestar's limitations, I still enjoy finding and examining galaxies I've never seen before.

I began this night by aiming low in the south to elliptical galaxy NGC1316, an elliptical galaxy in the constellation Fornax. In the image below NGC1316 is the large bright central object. Smaller galaxy NGC1318 is directly above center. In the lower left a dim fuzzy patch below a relatively bright pair of stars is galaxy PGC12706. Additional galaxies would have appeared in the field of view if I had moved NGC1316 below center. I missed this good opportunity.

Also in the southern sky was a close galaxy pair in Canis Major. I pointed Seestar there next. Centered in the image below, NGC2293 is below its close companion NGC2292. These two galaxies are separated by only 44 arc seconds! Just to the upper right of the centered pair is another galaxy, NGC2295, flanked closely by two foreground stars in our own galaxy. NGC2295 is about 3.75 arc minutes from NGC2292. It would be nice to see a more magnified image here, but this isn't possible with Seestar. 

Leaving southern sky glow, I moved north to Ursa Major where three galaxies were available for addition to my Messier collection. In the next image nearly edge-on spiral galaxy M108 is large enough to show some dark dust clouds and internal structure. There are three bright foreground stars from our own galaxy directly in front of M108. (Enlarge the image to see these more clearly.)

This night's next Ursa Major galaxy was barred spiral galaxy M109. The image below was good enough to show some spiral arms. Once again, a bright foreground star appears in front of the galaxy's disc. Two other dim galaxies can be seen in the same field of view. To the right of M109, near the right hand edge, is 13.4 magnitude galaxy PGC37553. The dim smudge to the lower left of M109 is 15th magnitude galaxy PGC37700.

The brightest Ursa Major galaxy of the night was M82 shown next. The hint of a dark lane cutting diagonally across the center is just visible in the enlarged image.

By the end of this session I had added three more objects to my Messier collection leaving only 26 more needed to reach the complete 110 total.