This is a rarely imaged galaxy in far southern Octans. A leisurely scan of my planetarium program indicated this might be a good candidate to shoot. It sits in a very faint bed of Galactic Cirrus dust too.
The Cirrus dust is pretty faint and the proximity to the pole (just 50deg elevation at the meridian) put it in a somewhat unfavourable position from my dark sky site in that it spent much of its arc across the sky in the upper portion of the glow of Canberra
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Never the less.... I thought I'd have a crack... but, like Rolf does, I had to push the processing just slightly in order to reveal the faint galactic cirrus but at at the expense of a slight increase in noise, which doesn't bother me too much, rather see the faint stuff than not
Along with the usual out in the elements pleasurable outdoor experience complete with beer, coffee and Friday night football and late night ABC discussions and quizzes on the radio (and lonely posts on IIS about mundane things) etc. each night..and apart from one night being plagued by some annoying wafting thin cloud at times (the type you can still image through but you know it ain't good), delivered good to excellent seeing with guide errors rarely greater than 0.1 pix (0.3 arcsec) and regularly well below, in fact for a period of a few hours one night the guide star essentially didn't move...serious astro orgasm material!
Anyway....referred to as a double barred spiral galaxy and at over 100 Million light years distant, this ain't a close galaxy and listed in LEDA at a modest 4.2' X 2.7' in size, it also isn't particularly large in angular size, so, the good seeing conditions proved a real blessing in revealing some of the tiny subtle features in the ring of the galaxy (didn't actually discard a single sub frame!). In fact, after finishing my processing, a quick peruse of the very few available images on the web revealed no image with greater resolution, so I was quite happy with the outcome. The small, spiral galaxy near the bottom right of the full frame image is ESO 048 - G 007
At 18hrs of total exposure, this is now officially the longest exposure I have done with the F3.8 AG12
would seem I just can't quite wait long enough to crack the elusive 20hr mark
(although had the fog not descended on Mon morning I would'a!
)
Close Up
Full Frame
Hubble Comparison
Hope you enjoy the view
Mike