m106


Another Image from Last Week

You might notice that both this and my previous post have images of galaxies rather than my usual nebulae (and more specifically, emission nebulae captured with narrowband filters).  That’s partly because I wanted to take advantage of the dark sky at the star party to photograph things I can’t shoot from home.  But it’s also true that at this time of year, the Milky Way doesn’t come up until 3AM or so, and all of the nebulae we photograph are in the Milky Way, so it’s now “galaxy season”. The largest galaxy in this image is M106, also known as […]


M106 and Neighbors

This image contains numerous galaxies, with M106 just being the largest one visible.  Several others are clearly visible in this small version of the image, and when you look at the original (full size) image many more galaxies, some just a few pixels in size, appear.  M106 is in the constellation Canes Venatici and is about 24 million light-years away. Captured in June of 2013 at Wa-chur-ed Observatory, this is one of the few LRGB images done from my home observatory.  Generally speaking, galaxies are too dim to be photographed in such light-polluted skies and this probably would have shown […]