Image of the day 01/06/2025

    NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets, John Hayes
    NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets
    Powered byPixInsight

    NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets

    Image of the day 01/06/2025

      NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets, John Hayes
      NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets
      Powered byPixInsight

      NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets

      Equipment

      Loading...

      Acquisition details

      Loading...

      Description

      NGC 1097  (Caldwell 67) is a barred spiral Seyfert galaxy [SB(s)b] that lies at a distance of about 45 Mly in the constellation Fornax and it's a fascinating object on a lot of levels.  The most unique feature becomes visible in long exposures, which reveals 4 linear jets forming a huge cosmic 'X' passing through the core of the galaxy.  These jets are fairly faint making them difficult to show along with the relatively bright core of the galaxy.  Studies have shown that these jets are actually streams of stars that are thought to be the shattered remains of a cannibalized dwarf galaxy.  NGC 1097A is the largest of two satellite galaxies that sits at about 42,000 ly from the center.  It's an elliptical galaxy that this image reveals as having a shell-like outer structure--at least at one end. 

      At its core, lies a super massive black hole (SMBH) with a mass of 140 million suns.  The mass of the SMBH was measured using the Atacamma Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations of dense gas kinematics.  (I've driven past the ALAMA and seen it on some of my travels through Chile and now I know more about what they do out there!).  Studies have shown that the central black hole is surrounded with a glowing ring of star forming regions made of gas and dust that spirals into the core of no return.  The central, optically bright core is also a strong 10 micron (infrared) source, which implies the presence of young stars.  The central 30 arc-seconds of the core has a bolometric luminosity (in the IR) of about 10^11 solar luminosities, which mostly originates in a ring of approximately 2kpc in diameter.  It sounds as if these young stars might not ever make it to old age before being eaten by the monster black hole at the core but that's speculation on my part.

      At an apparent magnitude of 10.2 and a moderately large size of 9.3′ × 6.3′, NGC 1097 is a fairly popular target for imagers in the S. Hemisphere.  I turned my scope on this object in early November right after I was supposed to travel to Chile to install the new focuser on my scope.  Unfortunately, there was an unexpected shipping SNAFU when the crate containing my equipment got stuck in Brazilian customs on its way from Austria to Santiago.  My bags were packed and I was ready to leave for the airport (literally within an hour) when I got word that no one knew when the equipment would arrive.  So I scrambled to cancel my trip and come up with a new plan.  In the meantime, I turned the scope on this object and fired away.

      During this run, the seeing ranged from poor to "pretty good" so I let the scope run...and run...and run, gathering 1,243 subs (103.6 hrs) of data.  I didn't have another project in the wings and my hope was to be able to pull out enough good data to make it work.  In the end, I set my acceptable threshold at 1.7" when I sorted out what data to include.  The best I might have gotten was around 1.2" and the median might have been around 1.5".  Lately, I've been gathering data in the range of 0.8" - 1.2", so 1.7" seems terrible...but that's another story!)

      I used SPCC with a Sb spiral galaxy as the white reference for the color correction.  As I almost always have to do, I had to make some minor color tweaks to get everything looking right.  For example, somewhere along the way, I may have introduced a very minor red-cast into the low brightness regions that I had to gently tone down.  To my eye, this looks about right--at least on my monitor.  Hopefully it's good on yours as well.  I had to do some masked stretching to make the star streams a bit more visible.  Even with this much data, they are pretty faint but I still walked a fine line to avoid over enhancing them.

      As most of you know by now, pulling out detail in an image is what lights my fire so hopefully I haven't overdone it.  I ran BXT at about 50% for non-stellar objects and applied only a minor bit of MultiscaleLinearTransform enhancement to the fine detail.  Note that the image that I've posed here has been resampled from the original 0.18"/pixel sampling that the camera produces on the scope.

      After I finished this image, I finally made my trip to Chile to work on the scope but I'll leave that story for another post.  Hopefully I got this image "about right" so feel free to hit me up with C&C if I missed anything.

      John


      PS  Oh my gosh!  I almost forgot to mention that this image would not have been possible without help from my friend @Mark McComiskey who kindly loaned me his spare ASA control hub after mine failed shortly after starting on this image.  Mark immediately jumped in and generously loaned me his backup hub, which enabled me to keep going until I got a new hub.  So...thanks again Mark!  Your help was greatly appreciated and I look forward to being able to someday return the favor.

      Comments

      Revisions

        NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets, John Hayes
        Original
        NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets, John Hayes
        B
      • Final
        NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets, John Hayes
        C

      Histogram

      NGC 1097 and Its Mysterious Star Jets, John Hayes

      In these public groups

      Cloudy Nights