This is my 200th picture that I publish on AB. How time flies...
I would like to give a big thank you to this wonderful community! In all this time I was able to meet many great people and learned a lot.
Number 200 is also the "LastLight" of my Lacerta 10 inch Newtonian with 1200mm focal length. The telescope already has a new owner and I am very excited about further images made with that scope. :-)
Taken in four nights at the end of September I finally got some time to do the image processing. This resulted in about 18 hours of exposure time (divided into 7.75 hours for RGB and 10.25 hours for luminance). The actual "star" of the image is certainly not the small NGC galaxy, but rather the molecular cloud MBM 54, which, as far as I know, is located just above our galactic plane and thus clearly in front of the galaxy. This can be seen optically very well by the overlaying of the galaxy by the "dust".
MBM 54 is very faint and it was studied and surveyed by Magnani, Blitz and Mundy (hense the name MBM) in 1985 and now constitutes the MBM catalogue. These molecular clouds often called as Integrated Flux Nebulae (IFN) and are truly faint as they reflect residual light from our own Milky Way galaxy .
NGC 7497 is about 60 million light years away while the MBM 54 cloud is about 900 light years away from our Solar System.
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