Centaurus Chain of Galaxies

[gregbradley]

I just had 4 clear nights at my dark site. Fabulous seeing for most of it.

I noticed this one in the Sky when I was slewing the scope in this area.

There are some fairly unusual looking galaxies in the view. A wild looking circular one mid right side and a nice looking spiral up near the top.

I was also delighted at the performance of installing my MMOAG offaxis guider onto my TEC180. Perfect round stars every time with unlimited exposure time on the Tak NJP mount.

I'll post an image of that setup. Lots of stuff hanging off the end of this rather large scope.

LRGB 90 60 60 60 for a total of 4:30 hours over 2 nights. It would have been more but Microsoft Windows update was having trouble updating and at 3am it kept restarting the computer. It took me 2 nights to work out why imaging stopped at 3am instead of 5:30am.

http://www.pbase.com/gregbradley/image/134561691/large regular

http://www.pbase.com/gregbradley/image/134561691/original large

Here's an image of the flattener, offaxis guider and various adapters to the camera:

http://upload.pbase.com/image/134562827

Greg.

[barx1963]

Lovely image Greg, you must be proud of that one! Can you let us know what are the major galaxies in the image, especially the little interacting pair on te far right.

Malcolm

[strongmanmike]

Very cool Greg :thumbsup:

Some amazing galaxies in there, the tight spiral is mad

Nice work

Mike

[TrevorW]

Nice image Greg everything is there including a nice collection of faint fuzzies

[RobF]

Wonderful image - truely a credit to you and a successful night.

[gregbradley]

I looked in my version of the sky. Its not well labelled. But if you have the Sky or similar this chain is about 2/3rds the way between Centaurus A and M83 and bit above them forming a triangle.



Thanks Mike. That tight spiral is wild I agree. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. It would make a good Hubble target so they get a really high res shot of it.

[ballaratdragons]

Fantastic work Greg.

It's nice to know I'm not the only person imaging the Centaurus Galaxy Cluster.
Usually it feels like I am. And there are soooo many beautiful Galaxies in the Cluster.

Very nice detail :thumbsup:

[gregbradley]

Thanks Ken. I have to admit though I found it by accident scrolling through the Sky.

Greg.

[jjjnettie]

Superb work. a joy, thanks

[Ross G]

Hi Greg,


Wow...again an amazing photo of something unusual!

Again, I am rushing to the Star Atlas to see where it is.

So much detail and such a variety of objects, it's like 50 photos in one!


Thank you.


Ross.

[DavidU]

That's one amazing image Greg. Fabulous processing.

[alexch]

Wow! I am speechless... The central spiral alone would be make the image worthwhile but with all the other galaxies in the field it becomes a real visual treat!

Thanks for sharing, this image is in favourite list of deep-sky images.

Cheers,
Alex

[astroron]

Nice group of galaxies there Greg, very fine image :thumbsup:
Cheers

[[1ponders]]

Amazing shot Greg. so much going on in there.

You must have been picking up on some of my thoughts. That central spiral galaxy is NGC4622 and I was imaging that area on the 1/5/11. It was mentioned in this thread here (http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=74838). Mind you having seen your shot I might try to hunt down that one at the top of your frame. It looks very interesting.

[gregbradley]

Thanks JJ. It was fun rediscovering the potential of the TEC scope after using the larger Planewave a lot over the last few months. The TEC can reach quite deep as well.



It is a wonderful collection of unusual images. Seeing was just superb under a stunningly clear sky. My dark site just delivers the good skies night after night so am I very lucky there. A couple of nights it came over totally cloudy after sunset. By 9:30/10pm it was totally clear horizon to horizon. It does this sort of thing often. Its like anticloud type environment there at night. For it to be cloudy it really needs to be cloudy.



Thanks David. It did take a bit of work to keep the image clean.
It was also taken at -45C. The FLI camera can really cool down hard.



Thanks Alex. It was largely unkown to me until the other night. It makes you wonder how many things there are that are interesting in the night sky. There seems to be no shortage.



Thanks a lot Ron.

[multiweb]

Such a cool field! Loads to see. Some really interesting structures too. Lovely colors and details in the processing. Nice work indeed. :thumbsup:

[h0ughy]

wow Greg you have been an imaging monster

[ballaratdragons]

:rolleyes: :lol:

atleast you imaged it while you were there ;)

[gregbradley]

Thanks Marc. Once I saw the test image I was hooked. Such unusual galaxies. The nice spiral one up top is probably what our Milky Way looks like from a distance. I may try it out with the Planewave to see if I can get a closer look at a couple of them.

I got the FLI Microline camera humming at -45C for these series of images. It was cold at night between 4 and 9C.



Thanks Dave. I have taken a lot of images lately. I love it!



I've taken a few galaxy clusters recently. I don't think I have posted all of them. So I was interested in any more of them. They do make for interesting shots. I suspect there are lots of them to be found. Looking through the Sky occassionally I see a large amount of galaxies close together. The trouble is probably most are really really small to our view.

[marc4darkskies]

Very nice image Greg! Did you do long subs? At a dark site I'd shoot for 30 minutes!

Cheers, Marcus

[gregbradley]

You know I probably will do that next time. I was stoked I was getting perfectly round stars at full camera resolution using the MMOAG. The guide scope was a bit hit and miss due to flexure but was OK at short focal lengths.

I also had the camera at -45C, so it is virtually noiseless (its a very clean chip to start with) and it almost doesn't need darks.

I will check that out next time to see if I get a better signal to noise ratio. I used to take 15 minutes as standard.

The only problem with 30 minutes is the fact that the 8300 chip has small wells - only 20,000 electrons. The 16803 has over 100,000!.

What that means is bright stars oversaturate very easily and at 30minutes it may make them look a bit messy plus I might lose colour in a lot of the stars. But 15 minutes should be fine in most scenes.

What's the theory of long subs at dark sites? Lower % of read noise to signal allowing more detail in dim areas? Less overall noise?

Greg.

[ballaratdragons]

Ross, the cluster is really easy to find without GoTo.

I have made a map for you showing how to star hop to it.

1. Travel out the top of Crux the distance of the length of Crux to the 2 stars next to each other.

2. Travel the same distance and direction to the next star as bright as the previous two.

3. Travel back a tad and to the right.

I have circled where the cluster is in red. :thumbsup:

That is Omega Centauri Glob and Centaurus 'A' Galaxy on the left of the map.

and also another map showing some of the Galaxies in there :)

[Stevec35]

Extremely nice Greg!

Cheers

Steve

[Paul Haese]

Superb work Greg. I reckon the two main galaxies are fantastic. Star colours are great and the background has that lovely grey look to it too. Well done.

[mithrandir]

The centre of frame is at RA 12:42:49.885 Dec -40:34:17.142
The image is 0:48:01.616 by 0:35:48.320 degrees.

Nice image Greg. :)

[Hagar]

Greg, this is fantastic. Detail right down to the tiny galaxies.

I love your setup and just looking at your equipment photos I am drooling and gealous.
My wife would kill me.

[Tom Davis]

Stunning image, Greg!! Excellent detail!

Tom

[renormalised]

Fantastic shot there, Greg :). Lots of galaxies....I like the interacting pair on the far right of the piccie and the tight spiral right of centre. The nebulous irregular patch in the top right hand area is an interesting one as well.

[SkyViking]

Fantastic image with so much to see and very beautifully processed. According to my count there are around 70 galaxies in that field alone - impressive! Congratulations on yet another stunning image.

[Ross G]

Hi Ken,

Thank you for the map, it makes it easy to find.


Regards


Ross.

[atalas]

Very nice field Greg.

[richardo]

Top work Greg.
Very nicely processed and there are some amazing galaxy details.
Every galaxy has a different profile... incredible area.

All the best
Rich

[gregbradley]

Thanks for doing that Ross.

Greg.

[gregbradley]

Thanks Steve. There are some unusual galaxies that are worth further imaging at longer focal length. Its in a good position for imaging at the moment.





Thanks Paul. It did take a bit to get everything right but it was good data in the first place. I actually used a Takahashi field flattener and it seems to work very well.



Thank you. I was pleased the offaxis guider worked so well. It improves the quality of the images noticeably.



Cheers Doug. I have a renewed like of my TEC scope now the offaxis guider is working so well. The power of that scope is showing through better.



Cheers Tom. I'm looking forward to more RH shots from you.



It is an odd collection of galaxies. The most unusual I have seen.



Cheers mate. The seeing this time of year when it gets a bit cold is pretty stunning. Even stars low on the horizon were hardly blinking at all and near the zenith they were rock solid.





Cheers Louie. I used some inverted masks which I learned from your tutorial so thank you!

They are very very handy.



Everything was working well. The camera was at an incredible -45C and is just almost completely clean at that temp. The mount was guiding incredibly well with very low guide errors and the offaxis guider was working well. The scope is amazing but I haven't always gotten the best out of it. I understand the scope better now and how to match the scope and camera and get the best out of it. It can take a while of using gear to really get to know it and play to its strengths.

Greg.