This is the result of a great effort by a group of 4 imagers. Myself, as well as
pete_xl,
pmneo, and
Francesco Meschia. I'm very lucky to have a group of friends I've met through this hobby that happen to have the same or very similar scopes/cameras as I. We decided to choose M 106 as the target, and over a period of around 2 months gathered as much data as we could in not only Ha, L, R, G, and B, but also Oiii as suggested by pmneo. The Oiii signal was much more interesting/strong than we expected and it added some nice data to the final image.
In this image, there are almost 300 galaxies with the ultra deep 252 hours of data, including PGC2299122, which is 3.8Gly away. There are also many quasars well beyond 10Gly, and discovering the things in the background was one of the most rewarding parts of this entire project for me. The star of the show, M 106, a strikingly beautiful intermidiate spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici, is a very special galaxy with its extra pair of arms. NASA's Messier Catalog website says it best "
Most spiral galaxies only have one pair of arms, but M106 has an extra set, seen here as red wisps of gas. Unlike the other arms, these two extra arms are made up of hot gas rather than stars. Astronomers attribute these ghostly arms to the supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s center. The extra arms appear to be an indirect result of the violent churning of matter around the black hole." One of the main goals of this project was to capture those extra arms, and hopefully this rendition of the data captures it well for only a 5" APO.
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