I took Friday, Mon and Tues off work, giving me a possible 5 nights (without work the next day) over the new Moon weekend, to hopefully get out to the observatory and collect some photons. Well, I was blessed with 3 clear nights, so that's not bad, the seeing was very good for half of one of the nights, above average for a few hours of another but only average and sometimes below, the rest of the time, so as usual, I try to use the periods of better seeing for the Luminance if I can and the periods of worse seeing for the RGB. In the end I used every single sub taken over the three nights though...oh except one, where I bumped the counterweights walking my bulky frame around inside the confines of the dome doh!
For a slowly slotherfying, aging and rather bulky individual
I'm still surprisingly good at squeezing myself around and crawling under the mount/scope/counterweights inside the 2.3m dome (oh and turning it by hand)....errr?..it would be easier if I lost a few inches from around the waist though
......ooops
This lovely pair of small galaxies, is in the southern constellation of Crater (The Cup) and they are both about 45 Million light years away, with the larger NGC 3511 probably the closer of the two. NGC 3511 is an intermediate spiral and is approx 5.8' X 2' while the smaller NGC 3513 is a barred spiral approx 2.9' X 2.4' in apparent size.
NGC 3511 & 3513 in Crater (This is a close up crop, click on image once to enlarge, then click on it again for a full res view)
The remarkable thing though, at least for me, is the sheer number of faint background galaxies, of all shapes and sizes, all over the full frame image. If your screen is
properly contrast/brightness adjusted and you can view in a darkened room, they are bloody everywhere, there would have to be several hundred at least, maybe over 1000 even?! just in this small field
and would certainly reach down
below Mag 21/22 I recon. Best to view the
Full Frame Full Resolution version for this faint galaxy surfing though
Those with a keen eye will notice the bottom 1/3 or so (and elsewhere in the frame) in the Full Frame colour image, it appears a bit brighter but if we stretch the 8.6hrs of Luminance, we see that this is not a gradient but rather some
very faint Galactic Cirrus dust. I know it is not a gradient because it is in all Luminance frames, in the same spots, taken from both sides of the meridian, plus it clearly looks patchy and like billowing dust clouds, as galactic cirrus tends to look, very faint though...cool
Enjoy
Mike