Galaxy marathon

[SamD]

I've had a go at documenting the visual surface brightness of about 100 of the biggest and brightest spiral disk galaxies visible from Brisbane. It might be helpful when planning exposure times for dimmer galaxies.

The pdf (http://home.exetel.com.au/df/astro/GalaxySurveyNotes.pdf) is here (about 7MB). It's useful to display the bookmarks in the pdf.

The galaxy magnitude maps are also up here (http://home.exetel.com.au/df/astro/default.htm?cat=13), with higher resolution collages for the smaller (http://home.exetel.com.au/df/astro/MagMaps_Small.jpg), medium (http://home.exetel.com.au/df/astro/MagMaps_Medium.jpg), and all (http://home.exetel.com.au/df/astro/MagMaps_Large.jpg) galaxies.

I should be able to apply the same techniques to any other interesting galaxy images, especially with low surface brightness features (post a link here or PM if interested). I'd need a link to the original unstretched luminance stack, (green filter or unfiltered would also work). It would also be much easier if it was flat/background gradient corrected.

[RobF]

Many thanks Sam. Very interesting. Will have to take some time to digest all that info.

[batema]

Very impressive and interesting. How long did this project take you?

[Atmos]

That's all pretty cool, will have to have a closer look when I get to a more stable internet connection.

[SamD]

Thanks, the galaxies are about 1-2 hrs each, over the last two years. I've got the plate solving, photometry measurements and pdf generation mostly automated now, so the processing is fairly quick.

[strongmanmike]

Very cool Sam, so you imaged all those galaxies yourself? Wow, interesting stuff :thumbsup:

Mike

[RickS]

Nice work, Sam! I wasn't surprised to see NGC7424 down the bottom :)

I probably have integrated luminance stacks for a bunch of galaxies sitting on my drive at home. I'll send you a list...

Cheers,
Rick.

[SamD]

Thanks Mike, yes all mine from home. A lot of the northern galaxies aren't great quality, but good enough to make decent measurements from. Low in the Brisbane skyglow to my north, I was surprised to get an image at all of M101 !

[SamD]

Thanks Rick, yes, I made the NGC7424 "mistake" a couple of years ago from Brisbane !

[dylan_odonnell]

Fascinating and thorough dataset and analysis. Well done! Saved!

[codemonkey]

That's a great resource, Sam; clearly a lot of work went into this. I'll definitely be using this as a reference. Thanks again!

[multiweb]

Grrruuss..... :whistle: