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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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!!
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