Space Needle!

NGC 4565 “Needle” Galaxy. Spiral galaxy NGC 4562 is seen in upper right along with many smaller IC-catalogued galaxies in the background.

The “real” Space Needle in my opinion is not the iconic observation tower in Seattle Washington shown below but is the galaxy NGC 4565 pictured above!

The Space Needle, an observation tower in Seattle Washington, features an observation deck 520 ft (160 m) above ground, providing views of the downtown Seattle skyline, the Olympic and Cascade Mountains, Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Elliott Bay, and various islands in Puget Sound.

NGC 4565 , the “Needle” Galaxy is an edge on spiral galaxy 40 million light years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. The narrow profile, less than two arc minutes in width gives the galaxy its’ needle-like appearance. Other galaxies appear in the field as well, the brightest being the barred spiral NGC 4562 in the upper right.

Capture info:
Location: Orion’s Belt Remote Observatory, Mayhill NM
Telescope: Officina Stellare RiDK 400mm
Mount: Paramount MEII
Camera: SBIG STX 16803
Data: LRGB 6,6,5,6.5 hours respectively
Processing: Pixinsight 1.8.8.7

For the full resolution version see the thumbnail link on the lower right panel of this page

Location of the “Space Needle” two hours after sunset (blue square). Toward the east between Ursa Major and the gibbous Moon at the time of this post, NGC 4565 is quite dim actually and requires at least a medium aperture telescope to see at magnitude 10-11

NGC 4565 is one of the brightest members of the Coma I Group located about 47+ million light years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. The brightest member of the group is NGC 4725. The Coma I Group is rich in spiral galaxies while containing few elliptical and lenticular galaxies. Coma Berenices means “Berenice’s Hair” in Latin and refers to Queen Berenice II of Egypt, who sacrificed her long hair as a religious offering.

Thanks for reading!

DrDave

News from Orion’s Belt Remote Observatory

Tak180 ED with Optec focuser and SBIG 16200 camera

Pier 2 gets a makeover!

After waxing poetic about the old Van Slyke focuser retrofit for the Tak180 it turned out this was not going to be accurate enough for unattended remote focusing. Back “in the day” which in this case means the early 2000’s a common solution for motorizing focusers for imaging was retrofitting the focuser with a motorized device. The standard at that time was Robofocus. This was before focusers were routinely manufactured with integrated encoder based motors. Although Robofocus is still effective for some setups, I realized after testing it I had to go in a different direction. The Tak 180 has a critical focus zone of only about 17 microns! That is going to require ultimate precision with respect to focusing. Not to mention when I tried to make adjustments to the gearing on the robofocus, I inadvertently fractured the smaller gear wheel! Ultimately I decided to go with Optec’s low profile focuser pictured above. The new set up also includes an SBIG 16200 camera with 8 position filter wheel. Not shown in the image is a LodestarX2 guide camera which I was able to mount into the Tak180 finder bracket using the 3 set screws.

Van Slyke focuser, which I replaced, is very solid but the robofocus retrofit is not sufficiently robust for our purposes. Blue arrow points to where the smaller gear broke off!

The prior set up on Pier 2 had both the Tak 180 and FSQ refractor. I removed the refractor as I can only use one scope at a time anyway on this pier. This will eliminate any chance of the equipment on the 2 piers from colliding (I tested this out thoroughly!) and so now we have the option of running both piers simultaneously!

Pier 1 project update. The following are projects completed or ongoing with the 16″ RiDK telescope

Single raw 15 frame showing M77 and its barely visible binary companion NGC 1055 to the upper left!

M77 completed! Finally finished data collection for M77 which I started in November of 2018. At that time a type 2 supernova was discovered in that galaxy (SN2018ivc) It will be very interesting to see what it looks like after processing! At the time I started this I neglected to address the presence of the “companion” spiral galaxy NGC1055 which is barely visible to the upper left! This is actually a gravitationally bound binary galaxy system! I might have to revisit it sometime in the future. For now it will unfortunately be getting cropped out of the final image ):

 

Single raw 15 minute image of NGC4565, also known as the “needle galaxy”. A satellite trail is seen to the upper left

NGC 4565, a beautiful edge-on spiral galaxy is an ongoing project but nearly completed. Only the blue-filtered images remain. Many other small galaxies can be seen in the lower 1/3rd of the image

 

NGC2264 is predominantly an emission nebula which has given rise to a central bright cluster of stars, aka “Christmas tree cluster”. This is a single raw 10 minute blue filtered image. You can see some of the nebulosity in the upper portion of the image but also evident is a fairly large reflection halo from the bright central star.

NGC 2264 basically contains 2 objects: the Cone nebula and Christmas Tree Cluster. I just started on this project and debated on whether it was a good idea for the 16″ because of what you can see happening in this image. A huge halo is evident in this blue-filtered image from the internal reflection of the bright central 4th magnitude star in the cluster. For now we will look at it as a processing challenge! Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Dr Dave

 

 

Hidden gems

Single 15 minute raw frame of NGC4565 taken with the 16″ RiDK at OBRO (Orion’s Belt Remote Observatory). Green channel. It just happened that on this night we had the best seeing since my observatory went up 2+ years ago! The galaxy is slightly off center because that was where the best guide star was located. A typical satellite trail is to the upper left. Several small galaxies are seen in the lower part of the field (see below)

The well-known galaxy NGC 4565 or the “Needle Galaxy” is seen edge on from Earth at a distance of around 50 million light years. It is also a popular imaging target and so I am in the process of imaging it with the 16″ telescope at Orion’s Belt Remote Observatory  What is not as well known are the thousands upon thousands of other objects that are also contained in this 45 arc minute square of space! This is not something I am discovering for the first time but since we had a superb night of seeing when this image was taken I decided to look a little more closely at the “background” of my image. I think this activity is very important in general for anyone imaging out there because you might surprise yourself with what you find. And to be fair, you never know if perhaps there is something”undiscovered” in your images! So the steps I take to uncover the “hidden gems” in my images are as follows:

1. I take my image and open it in the program I use for image processing, i.e. Pixinsight

2. 

   Go to scripts> image analysis> imagesolver

   Plate solve the image. To do that you do what it says in the caption and image above.

3. After you run the script I just leave the image open and then go to the next step which is to run the annotation script. That’s the one that tells you what’s in there!
   

   Under scripts go to the “render” category and then under that select “annotate image”

   The result is seen below:

4. 

   NGC 4565 “and friends”. After running the annotate image script you see the grid and many named objects in there. This was actually the result of the second run of the annotation script. The first time some of the galaxies were unlabeled (see below).

    

Now let’s look a little more carefully at this:

A little more magnification shows there 5 obvious named galaxies but one I circled which was not named after I ran the script the first time.

The small fuzzy patch in the center here is not dust or some other artifact but is actually “IC3571”, an irregular galaxy. Quite dim. It is around magnitude 17-18. Remember this is a green filtered image so my guess is a lot more information would exist with an unfiltered exposure! As I look around the image I see all of the galaxies named are of the “IC” catalog type. This stands for “Index Catalog” and is a supplement apparently to the well known “NGC” catalog or “New General Catalog” which was produced at the end of the 19th century! Since then the explosion in data acquisition over just the last 20 years has produced countless catalogs and databases which we now have access to! So back to the image. I was very curious why the galaxy I circled in white in the 2nd image above  was not designated as it was obviously brighter. I went back to the image annotation script and realized there was a galaxy catalog database that was not checked!

The “PGC Hyperleda” box was not checked the first time I ran the script

So what is this? “PGC” is the “Principal Galaxies Catalog” published in 1989. The “Lyon-Meudon” extragalactic database or “LEDA” was created at the Lyon observatory in France in 1983 and apparently the PGC catalog was based on LEDA. In the early 2000’s the PGC/LEDA database expanded to become “HyperLEDA” or literally LEDA on steroids! It’s basically an extragalactic database for astrophysical research and contains data on about 2 million galaxies! We’re light years away from the old “NGC” days!

After running the annotation script a second time with the PGC data included, the result was this:

After running the annotation script a second time with the PGC data included, the previously unknown galaxy is identified!

The galaxy I had circled in my original image that was unnamed is now identified as “PGC42060”!

More information about this region can be investigated on the HyperLEDA database website. That will keep you busy for awhile!:

But that’s not all! What else could be hiding in the background? You can also go to the well known astronomical database “Simbad”:

Simbad home page

You have a number of options from here. If you enter the name of the principal object in this case NGC4565 and the size of the field (50 arc min) you will arrive on a page with a list of hundreds of identifiable objects. Not only galaxies, but planetary nebulae as well! If you go to the top of the Simbad home page, you can click on the second tab to the right labeled “Aladin”. There you can access a digitized sky survey image of your field that shows you where all of these objects are located:

If you go to this page you can run the applet “Aladin Lite” in your browser. Type in the target name and an actual image will be generated with color coded dots all over the place showing you what objects are in the field!

And you thought this was just about “pretty pictures”! Enjoy hunting for the “hidden gems” in your images!

Thanks for reading!

Dr Dave