Sombrero at 2850 mm FL

[Enrique]

I did some more sharpening to the dust line......

The famous Sombrero
Scope: RCX400 14" F8
Camera: QHY11
Guiding: SX-AO-L with Lodestar
LRGB: 120;120;120;120 10 min subs


I hope you like it


Enrique

[Hagar]

Very nice Enrique, You may be able to gain a bit more detail in the dust by selectively sharpening the dust lane a bit more.
Nice image of a tiny little galaxy.

[CoolhandJo]

Great! Love the dust lanes!

[renormalised]

Nice shots:)

In the second shot, it looks like the galaxy is rolling towards you!!!:)

[TrevorW]

Nicely done Enrique

[Saturn%5]

Great shot there keep em coming.

[Ross G]

Great galaxy shot.


Ross.

[Enrique]

Thanks for your comments. Regarding sharpening: I did a light deconvolution on the dust lane. It improved it but if I increase it, it will look excessive.

Thanks again,

Enrique

[multiweb]

Very nice shot Enrique. Natural processing, lovely colors and details in the dust lanes. Not overdone at all. :thumbsup:

[Ken]

Well done I like the way you can almost look through the galaxy to the far side. I think the dust lane will handle some more sharpening to make this image really pop.
Clear skies Ken

[[1ponders]]

Wow, that is impressive Enrique. Very nice shot. The detail in the dust is amazing.

[atalas]

Nice work.

[John Hothersall]

Thats a good fl and detail in dust is just wonderful.

John.

[Enrique]

New version

Enrique

[von Tom]

Are there globular clusters I see?

[Paul Haese]

Nice work, lots of detail in the galaxy. Well done.

[Lester]

Wonderful image Enrique. Makes me wonder why Meade stopped making the RCX scopes. All the best.

[gregbradley]

Very nice Enrique.

When you did the sharpening to the dust lane did you mask it so it only affected the dust and not the galaxy halo? The halo appears to be slightly oversharpened increasing noise and graininess that could be smoothed slightly.

Greg.

[Enrique]

Thank you for your comments.

Tom: your question regarding the globular clusters: I had a look at one of the latests Sombrero pictures from Hubble and I think that my picture shows stars from the Milky Way. Hubble shows plenty of galaxies in the background but no globular clusters easy to see.


Greg: your question about sharpening. I did two deconvolution steps. One for the dust line and another one for the wing of the hat. The one for the dust line is much stronger than the other one. I combined them with layers and masks trying to keep the halo as it was. Lots of black, grey and white masking and blurring.
Anyhow, I see your point about noise in the halo. I will try to reduce it in the full version and then check how it looks in the cropped one. If it does not work, I will try directly in the cropped version.

Thanks,

Enrique

[madbadgalaxyman]

The question "How bright are the brightest globular clusters of M104?" has already been answered in several studies of the various brightnesses and sizes of the very numerous globulars belonging to the Sombrero.

In a paper by W.E. Harris et al., (see this preprint: arxiv 0909.4805 , which can be found at //arxiv.org), their
figure 10 shows a plot of the apparent magnitudes and B-V colours and B-R colours of a sample of the globular clusters belonging to M104.

From this graph, the following can confidently be said about how bright the many globulars are:

(1) There are a handful (say four or five) of very luminous globulars that are at an R-band (red) magnitude of around 18.3 , which corresponds to a B-band(blue) magnitude of around 19.6 (for a certain assumed colour of the clusters).
The most luminous globular clusters belonging to the Sombrero are therefore at a V-band (visual) magnitude of about 18.9

(2) These very luminous clusters are few in number, and are not representative of the overwhelmingly large numbers of fainter globulars that are found around M104.

(3) The system of multiple globular star clusters belonging to the Sombrero only starts to become reasonably populous at an R-band (red) magnitude of 19 or fainter, which corresponds to a B-band (blue) magnitude of 20.2 to 20.6

(4) The B-V optical colours of the numerous individual clusters around M104 vary between 0.65 and 1 . This is a substantial variation in colour.

Thus, it would seem that it would be quite a tough job to get that "swarm of bees" effect in an image of the the globular clusters of M104, as you would need to image at least two magnitudes deeper than the magnitudes I have mentioned!!

cheers,
madbadgalaxyman

[madbadgalaxyman]

I find the observation that no globulars could be seen in a Hubble Telescope image of M104 rather puzzling.

Bear in mind that even the (small number of) very largest globulars of M104 are only 1 arcsecond across, and many of the globulars are much smaller than this in angular size......in other words, these clusters will look exactly like stars in the telescope and in images of M104.

The only thing that allows us to distinguish this galaxy's system of multiple globular clusters from the foreground stars is the unusual distribution of very faint point sources surrounding the Sombrero. Of course, if you happen to have access to the HST with its 0.05 to 0.1 arcsec angular resolution, you can actually see some of these globulars as extended sources!

It is unfortunate that NGC5128, which is at 40 percent of the distance of M104, has so many faint foreground stars around it, as this makes its very rich population of globular star clusters impossible to see due to confusion with foreground stars. (N5128 has more than 1500 globulars, though the exact number is not yet certain)

Incidentally, if you go to //arxiv.org and look up the preprint with the Identifier arxiv 0901.1693, you will find that an unusually extended "globular cluster -like" object belongs to the Sombrero. This is an Ultra Compact Dwarf (UCD) galaxy, and these objects are half way between a globular cluster and a faint elliptical galaxy, in their properties. An UCD galaxy is usually several times the diameter of a very large globular cluster.