Messier 104, the Sombrero galaxy, again…
A long night last night (9 pm to 4 am), and not a whole lot to show for it! Here is an image of Messier 104 in the constellation Virgo. One of those nights that I kept making silly mistakes. A planned hour long session imaging m104 stretched into almost three. Below image is stack of 8 out of the 14 I took. Images are all 3 minute bulb exposures at ASA 800. Images were aligned, stacked, and enhanced with ImagePlus software. I haven’t got the colors are right, it appears bluish-green and should be whitish. Equipment used was the Celestron Nexstar11 mounted on an APT wedge, Meade F6.2 focal reducer, and Canon 300D camera. Weather was partly cloudy, transparency was generally good, turbulence was 6/10, and temperature was 50°F.
April 22nd, 2006 at 7:03 pm
Is the Imageplus software designed for the use with DSLR?.
I got a shot of M104 last night also.It came out pretty good.Not as good as your shot,as I was using prime focus.The sky was quite hazy but,I was still able to get some pix.
Very very nice image!!.
April 22nd, 2006 at 10:23 pm
ImagePlus was designed to support processing astro-images with digital cameras. It is an okay piece of software. It has its good points and a few bad ones as well. The version I have is about two years old, I assume some of my complaints about it have been fixed by now. A new version is rolled out every 3-4 months so keeping it up-to-date is expensive.
M104 is a great object, I’m not happy with the color and its not nearly deep enough, there should be more of the region around the core showing.
September 9th, 2006 at 5:15 am
You need more facts on the m104 galaxy likedistance, intrinsic brightness; size;location;general properties and history. this web site has no hard facts
September 9th, 2006 at 12:16 pm
Good point, however this weblog is a personal observing and imaging log, not an encyclopedia. That type of information is readily available on wikepedia, seds, or many other sites. In the future, I’ll try to provide some links to more detailed information on the particular object. Thanks for the suggestions.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:49 am
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