Centaurus A - 4 hours

[andyc (Andy)]

Beginning to get more of a hang of the mount, and I finally had the patience to spend more than an hour or two on one target . Centaurus A with 150mm f/5 Newtonian, 49 x 5-minutes, ISO800, EOS 60D. Taken from suburban Sydney, I was pretty happy to (just) catch the jet, a bit of the halo, and a few details in the dust and starclouds.

Larger version of the central view

Larger version of the wider view

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

Well done. That's a great image.

[ZeroID (Brent)]

Nice one, clouds have always curtailed my efforts on that one but one day ...

[raymo]

Nice one Andy; I've never gone that deep with 5128. One day.
raymo

[BruceG (Bruce)]

Great result Andy. I had a go as well but lost many subs to a cable hangup. I love the detail you have captured there vastly more stars in the central halo compared to mine. Well done!

[andyc (Andy)]

Originally Posted by cometcatcher

Well done. That's a great image.

Thanks Kevin!

Originally Posted by ZeroID

Nice one, clouds have always curtailed my efforts on that one but one day ...

Thanks Brent. Clouds have curtailed most of my efforts in the last six months, so it was very satisfying to spend time on one object

Originally Posted by raymo

Nice one Andy; I've never gone that deep with 5128. One day.
raymo

I'm sure you will, raymo, this one was more rewarding than I thought it would be!

Originally Posted by BruceG

Great result Andy. I had a go as well but lost many subs to a cable hangup. I love the detail you have captured there vastly more stars in the central halo compared to mine. Well done!

Thanks Bruce, the DSLR is performing very nicely. I hope you manage to sort the cable issue - always frustrating to lose a bunch of precious imaging time to a random problem.

[rmuhlack (Richard)]

that's a very respectable image! good work to pick up the jet and halo also

[raymo]

I'm not surprised it was rewarding. Objects that have intricate detail
that can be teased out are always [IMHO] more rewarding than an
amorphous nebula for instance.
raymo

[andyc (Andy)]

Originally Posted by raymo

I'm not surprised it was rewarding. Objects that have intricate detail
that can be teased out are always [IMHO] more rewarding than an
amorphous nebula for instance.
raymo

True! And I'm a bit of a sucker for galaxies that have these kinds of rewards, but limited by my 650mm focal length and not very dark skies. I guess that before trying Cen A, I wasn't convinced I'd have the resolution or depth to get much of the blue starclouds and certainly didn't think I'd see anything at all of the jet that shows up so wonderfully in the megadata images like Mike and Rolf's. But you never know till you try

It's still not as smooth as I'd like, but I'm not entirely sure I'll have the patience for another 4 hours to reduce the background noise substantially further, but maybe I'll fiddle with the processing again sometime it's very cloudy here.

[Robert9 (Robert)]

Great images Andy. I must try for it with my new ED100 - when the skies clear; I think Sydney has similar weather problems to Melbourne. You were lucky to get 4 hours.
Robert

[kosh]

Nice one Andy! Really good detail too. Perhaps a touch out of focus in the lower left (maybe a little bit of camera tilt ) but nothing to get hung up about. Good stuff.

Goran.

[Retrograde (Pete)]

A really great image Andy - especially given that it was done from the suburbs. Well done!

[Flugel88 (Michael)]

Very nice Andy better than my attempt with a CCD camera.
You've managed to capture the finer dark edges fantastic for a DSLR