The Sombrero Galaxy (M 104)

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About this Image

This brilliant galaxy was named the Sombrero Galaxy because of its visual appearance. We view it from just 6 degrees south of its equatorial plane, which is outlined by a rather thick dark rim of obscuring dust. The dust lane was probably the first discovered by William Herschel in his great reflector.

The galaxy situated at a distance of 50 million light years is of type Sa-Sb, with both a big bright core, and as one can see in shorter exposures, also well-defined spiral arms. It also has an unusually pronounced bulge with an extended and richly populated globular cluster system - several hundred can be counted in long exposures from big telescopes.

Recent very deep photographs from the Anglo-Australian Observatory show that this galaxy has a very extended faint halo.
Unfortunately the object is not rising above 30 degree of elevation and so affected by non-optimum seeing and transparency conditions from my latitude.
North is up;

Literature:
M 104 faint halo: 1.
Hubble Space Telescope images and text: 2.




Technical Details
Optics

16" cassegrain in secondary focus at f/10

Mount MK-100 GEM
Camera SBIG STL-11000M at -20C, internal filter wheel,
Filters Astronomik LRGB
Date March 17-18, 2007.
Location Wildon/Austria
Sky Conditions mag 5.5 sky, FWHM 2.4-2.8" temperature 10 C
Exposure L:R:G:B = 120:60:60:60 minutes (20-minute sub-exposures).
Processing Image aquisition in Maxim DL 4.56, Preprocessing in CCDStack; Fitsliberator; Curves, high pass filter, unsharp mask, color balance in Photoshop;