Tag Archives: galaxies

Everyone’s heard of NGC 253—this is NGC 254

September 30, 2013 CAS

Steve Crouch turns his eye to a less-often imaged galaxy. And captures at least 10 other galaxies into the bargain! He explains:

Thought I would try something not often imaged. It’s obvious from this image why people prefer NGC 253.

Catalogue and alternative designations NGC 254

Type Galaxy
Position 00 47.8, -31 25
Constellation Sculptor
Camera and Telescope STXL11002 and 36.8 cm Ritchey Chretien
Focal Ratio F9Exposure
Details LRGB 285:70:60:60 Luminance 1×1, Colours 2×2

Description

This is a SB0 type magnitude 12 galaxy roughly 2.6′ x1.7′ in size. It is almost exactly due north of the much better known NGC 253.

You can see more of Steve Crouch’s astrophotography over on his website at http://members.pcug.org.au/~stevec/

Articles

Stunning galaxy group NGC 7172 — Steve Crouch

September 5, 2013 CAS

Steve Crouch has come up with this pearler of a galaxy group, with NGC 7172 showing beautiful dust lanes and colour. Look closely and you’ll see at least 40 galaxies in this single photo! With an average of 100 billion stars per galaxy, that’s a heck of a lot of stars…

Catalogue and alternative designations NGC 7172 galaxy group, Hickson 90

Type Compact galaxy group
Position 22 02.0, -31 52
Constellation Piscis Austrinus
Camera and Telescope STXL11002 and 36.8 cm Ritchey Chretien Focal Ratio F9
Exposure Details LRGB 225:45:40:40 Luminance binned 1×1, Colours 2×2 with Baader filters

Description

This little group of galaxies doesn’t seem to be imaged much. NGC 7172 is lower left of centre (with the dust lane). NGC 7173, 7174 and 7176 form the interacting group just above centre. ESO 466-46 and 466-47 are to the lower right. The bright star is magnitude 6.7.

Galaxies range in size from 10 million stars up to 100 trillion! And there are some 170 billion galaxies in the known observable universe… Incomprehensible numbers.

Articles

M94—a strange looking galaxy

June 17, 2013 CAS

By Steve Crouch

I’ve had this data for M94 hanging around a while and wasn’t going to process it because I thought it was pretty poor quality. Anyway I employed the usual astrophotographic data manipulation techniques and came up with something that didn’t look too bad although it would have benefited from a lot more data. Of course you have to remember that this is only a small telescope.

This could be one of the last images from the Arizona telescope as my access is very infrequent now. I can’t complain though because I’ve had a good run.