[Paul Haese]

Thanks Allan, Geoff and Greg for your comments.

Originally Posted by Stevec35

Yep - nicely done Paul. One of the best sombreros I've seen in recent years.

Steve

Thanks Steve, that is high praise, but much appreciated.

Originally Posted by SkyViking

That's a very nice and smooth Sombrero indeed Paul. Apart from the fine detail I particularly like the colours
One I should get around to too, I've only ever done a couple of hours on it and then managed to pick out over 130 globulars, so can only imagine what must be lurking in your image already!

Thanks Rolf for your compliments. Hmm, I might need to investigate and do an overlay. Any suggestions for which programme to use. The SkyX does not seem to do that.

Originally Posted by Nico13

That is great Paul, I was just looking at the full image and seeing all the little Galaxys surrounding it in deep field in particular to the left and just to the lower right, there are hundreds of them.
A very very nice image.
Thanks for showing it.

Thanks Ken. Yes there are lots of small galaxies in the field. Though not as many as in the current field of another project that I am undertaking.

Originally Posted by Andy01

That new data has really made a heap of difference-and that in itself os very educational- its a really beautiful image now. Are you intending on going deeper still? Well done again

No plans at this stage to go deeper. Though with an observatory I can always add more next year if I wanted.

Originally Posted by madbadgalaxyman

Paul,

Most impressive how far that faint diffuse light seems to stretch outwards from the bright outline of this galaxy.

One of the puzzles in astronomy is why the halo of M104 should be relatively bright. In general, halos of spiral galaxies are very difficult to detect; at around 28-30 V magnitudes per square arcsecond.

In my view, the answer to this question is that M104 is actually an S0 galaxy rather than a spiral galaxy; the dust lane would be hardly noticeable if this galaxy were viewed face on!

Cheers,
Robert

I hasten to add, in an edit, that a lot of the " galaxy halo" detections reported in the IIS astro-imaging pages are probably not actually picking up the halo of a spiral galaxy.....mostly, the images are picking up a faint outer component of the planar disk structure, rather than the outer spheroidal halo component.

Here are some really good lecture notes on galaxy halos:
http://www.eso.org/sci/meetings/2015...015_online.pdf

The halo work by professional astronomers is really taking off exponentially, in the last few years; this is one of many specialized areas within astronomy that have benefitted from an unprecedented number of PhD students, postdocs, and early career researchers in astronomy;
each sub-field within extragalactic astronomy is now developing so fast that the poor Mad Galaxy Man finds it harder and harder to keep up!

Thanks Robert for your comments. Quite interesting. I will go and take a look at that thread. It might help with my processing of halos in future.

Talking to several high profile imagers at the AAIC a couple of years ago, it was interesting to hear the thoughts about imaging halos and tidal streams.