Trying to complete any target over the last few months has been a struggle. Clear nights have been far and few between and usually coincided with a bright or full moon.
I started this particular project about a month ago and with the future looking dismal for the next few weeks for any opportunity to collect more data, I decided to go ahead and process what I had.
NGC1097 is a barred spiral galaxy discovered by William Herschel in 1790 and lies about 45 million years away in the constellation of Fornax . It is interacting with its companion galaxy NGC1097A (smaller oval white blob at the upper left of NGC1097).
At the center is a supermassive black hole 100 million times the mass of our sun with the area immediately around it shining with radiation coming from material falling in (ref NASA).
Four faint tidal streams have been identified that appear to come radially from the center of the galaxy and unfortunately I was really only able to identify the two to the left in my image and in the inverted version, one of the streams to the right. Stream number umber 4, also to the right, was too faint to be brought out in what I found to be a tricky processing exercise for this target.
The "jets" apparently consist of individual stars created through gravitational interaction with small dwarf galaxies. One of these tidal streams has an unusual "dog leg" appearance in which the remnant of another dwarf galaxy (not NGC1097A) was discovered.
As others have done before, I have included inverted versions which show three of the four tidal streams, one labelled.
And that ends my journey back 45 million years. Clear skies
.
Comments