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Old 17-07-2020, 04:14 PM
Placidus (Mike and Trish)
Narrowing the band

Placidus is offline
 
Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Euchareena, NSW
Posts: 3,719
AS 805 Pavo: Two hundred galaxies

Here is Abell South 805 in Pavo: the Placidus Deep Field.

16.5 hours Luminance (33 x 30 min) all from this New Moon, plus 15 hours total RGB, about half from this new moon and half from 2018.

The thumbnail is a tight crop on the main cluster members. The full field is here.

In the full frame we've arrowed some 200 objects that we felt were either definite or highly probable galaxies based on their morphology, stopping at the point where we've probably falsely labelled a couple stars, and missed a couple real ones. No attempt has been made to distinguish cluster members from line of sight background fellows, but you can probably get a good idea by just eyeballing.

The cluster is dominated by a huge elliptical galaxy, showing as a warm homogenous orange, because it has used up all its star-forming gas, and all the short-lived hot young blue stars are long gone.

Compare with the gorgeous face-on spiral showing intense star formation in the spiral arms at 11 o'clock in the thumb, with hot young blue stars a-plenty, especially in the upper spiral arm.

At the seven o'clock edge of the thumb is a side-on spiral, with a strong boxy "X"-shape in the core indicating the presence of a central bar.

Toward ten o'clock and 12 o'clock edges of the thumb are two bluish tidally distorted galaxies.

In the full image, toward the top right corner, is an unmistakeable StarShip Enterprise.

Toward the 10 o'clock edge of the full frame is a very faint but blue and featureless galaxy, which may perhaps be a foreground dwarf.

FLI PL16803 on 20 inch PlaneWave CDK. All robotics hardware, scope control, and image processing software built/written in house by us.

Best,
Mike and Trish
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