Much of the luminance was collected with pretty good seeing (1.9 sec arc) but intermittent cloud. The rest was collected on a clear night with more ordinary seeing (2.6 sec arc). The colour was collected on a very hot evening where the camera would cool to only -25C instead of our usual -30C. No moon throughout.
There are two extremely dominant foreground stars, at a wild guess red giants. Between them is a half-edge-on spiral, NGC 3312, magnitude 12, with a beautiful salmon-pink nucleus and strongly blue spiral arms showing signs of disturbance from its noisy neighbours.
Off toward 4 o'clock is the visually overlapping pair NGC 3314, not interacting but just superimposed, with the dust from the closest one obscuring the more distant of the pair.
At 5 o'clock is the intriguing NGC 3316. We see a generally amorphous galaxy with a faint but very extended halo, a bright nucleus, and three other small bright blobs which may be involved, or may be line of sight. We can find nothing about these.
The cool star at 2 o'clock, SAO 179027, magnitude 6.5, spectral class K2, appears to have much irregular cloudy material associated with it. Perhaps it is material ejected by the star. That the other, brighter star, SAO 179041, mag 5, spectral class K5, has no such material around it makes it seem less like it is an artifact.
Another interesting small and irregular galaxy underneath the large spiral looks for all the world like a blue coffee bean.
We have counted at least 224 galaxies in the image. Many are featureless ellipticals, which are much easier to pick in the colour image because of their strong orange hue. Many more are spirals showing delightful complex morphology. We were only able to find 177 in the previous single night monochrome image.
Aspen GC16M on 20 inch PlaneWave CDK on MI-750 fork. Acquisition using our own software. Processing using our own GoodLook 64.
Well...rather sensational result that guys That was good to surf around at full res. For the best overall pleasing view however, I actually found opening the full size image and shrinking it in my browser to 50% looked the best...eeeeexcellent
Pristine skies, quality optics and a great imaging team.....hence a sublime result was never in question.
Nice one
Thanks very much Peter, that's kind.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joshua Bunn
Lovely photo! Really liking the colour profile!
Josh
Cheers, Josh. It's nice when the colours actually tell us something about the beasties that are lurking there.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmos
This image is exceptional M&T!
I give it a double
Your writeup is also very informative
Thanks Colin!
Quote:
Originally Posted by RickS
Very cool, M&T. Like a box of rare galactic chocolates
Celestial chocolates, yum! Thanks Rick!
Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Well...rather sensational result that guys That was good to surf around at full res. For the best overall pleasing view however, I actually found opening the full size image and shrinking it in my browser to 50% looked the best...eeeeexcellent
...here, have one of these
Mike
Thank you so much, Mike. My hand hovered near the button to do one more round of deconvolution, we thought of you, and left it alone.
Deep field, yet the bright star colours are beautifully preserved. As others have said, great skies, great optics, great electronics and the skill to make the most of them all.
I was having fun playing ‘spot the quasar’ with this image and the simbad database :-)
Cheers
Andrew.
Bigger scale than my image and more detail as a result. Nice colour and smooth background. I went looking around and gave up at 100 galaxies. I'll take it that you have the right count. Nice image MnT.
Wow! That's very nice Mike. Great details in the faint fuzzies.
Thanks Marc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cometcatcher
Holy "insert expletive here". Reminds me of Hubble's deep image field.
I've go to try for that, even if I end up with a much smaller image scale.
Thanks, Kevin. It was very interesting that tripling the exposure over the first posting caused the galaxy count to increase only marginally, from 177 to 224 or so. The degree of certainty increased, as did the clarity of the morphology, but the actual count didn't increase much more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by willik
Very nice image Quality
Martin
Ta, Martin.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alocky
Deep field, yet the bright star colours are beautifully preserved. As others have said, great skies, great optics, great electronics and the skill to make the most of them all.
I was having fun playing ‘spot the quasar’ with this image and the simbad database :-)
Cheers
Andrew.
Thanks for the kind and thoughtful comments, Andrew. We are now inspired to go hunting for little blue dots, cattle-dog in hand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy01
That's one heck-u-va good image M&T, one of your top 3 imo
Absolutly marvellous as Richie would say.
So much to see as others have mentioned previously.
Have a couple of these from me too
Thanks muchly, Andy! We're thrilled that you like it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Well..ok, here have three from me then
Thanks Mike. That's very reassuring.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
That's a fascinating image. So many galaxies with so many stars in them. It highlights the overwhelming size of our universe.
Greg.
Aye, Greg. A wild guess might be something like half a trillion stars went to make up the galaxies in the image. And even if only the tiniest fraction have intelligent life ...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Camelopardalis
Beautiful
I’m going to need a bigger scope with all this drooling...
Cheers, Dunk. We are turning you toward the Dark Side!
Although Mike does most of the writing up, he wants to say that Trish plays an invaluable role getting motivated (look, it's clear and the wind is dropping!), in choosing the target (hey, we've not done that galaxy with the new camera), actually taking the images (she can operate the whole thing herself), or supervising me if I'm driving (you've got the lens cap on the guidescope; the focus run looks dodgy; do you really mean to do four one-second subs; the script says that the dome is closed after the first light frame), and very importantly in the colour balance, sharpness, and contrast of the final images. She is also a magnificent moral support in dark times.
Bigger scale than my image and more detail as a result. Nice colour and smooth background. I went looking around and gave up at 100 galaxies. I'll take it that you have the right count. Nice image MnT.
and eye popping 
image definitely reminiscent of the Hubble deep field to be sure.
