About 40,000 light-years across, M83 is popularly known as the Southern Pinwheel for its pronounced spiral arms. But the wealth of reddish star forming regions found near the edges of the arms' thick dust lanes, also suggest another popular moniker for M83, the Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. Camera: FLI ProLine PL09000 Scope: Planewave 20" CDK Exposure times: L: 8 x 600s R, G, B: 6 x 300s (30m per channel) Total exposure time: ~3 hours hours Again only 3 hours of data are sufficient to reveal a wealth of interesting details. Many many fainter galaxies can be counted in the background. Special thanks to John Noble for sharing the data!
NGC 7331 (also known as Caldwell 30) is a spiral galaxy about 40 megalight-years (12 Mpc) away in the constellation Pegasus. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784. NGC 7331 is the brightest member of the NGC 7331 Group of galaxies. [Description from Wikipedia] The galaxy is similar in size and structure to the galaxy we inhabit, and is often referred to as "the Milky Way's twin", although recent discoveries regarding the structure of the Milky Way may call this similarity into doubt Technical Details: (RA, Dec) center: (339.271585999, 34.4194478982) degrees Orientation: 0.20016608734 deg E of N Pixel scale: 0.651006126966 arcsec/pixel Acquired on August 10, 2013 from Blue Canyon, Ca L: 8 x 20m R,G,B:8 x 10m each (2x2 bin) Pixel scale: 0.65 arcsec/pixel Total exposure time: ~6.5 hours Main Camera: QSI 583 WSG Guide Camera: SXV Lodestar (on OAG) Mount: Astro-Physics Mach 1 Scope: Celestron Edge HD 8" (FL: 2145 mm) SXV Adaptive Optics Image Aquisition software MaximDL Registed, Calibrated and Stacked in MaximDL Post Processed entirely with PixInsight 1.8
