Imaged the galaxy M106 on the nights of May 15/17/19, 2023. M104 has an apparent magnitude (v) of 8.4 and an apparent size of 18.6 × 7.2 arcsec.
Per Wikipedia (reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_106): "
Messier 106 (also known as
NGC 4258) is an
intermediate spiral galaxy in the
constellationCanes Venatici. It was discovered by
Pierre Méchain in 1781. M106 is at a distance of about 22 to 25 million
light-years away from
Earth. M106 contains an
active nucleus classified as a
Type 2 Seyfert, and the presence of a central
supermassive black hole has been demonstrated from
radio-wavelength observations of the rotation of a
disk of molecular gas orbiting within the inner
light-year around the black hole.
[8]NGC 4217 is a possible companion galaxy of Messier 106."
Imaged with a William Optics GT81 at F4.7 (382 mm focal length) using Flat6A II field flattener/0.8x reducer, UVIRcut filter, and ZWO ASI 533MC Pro. Total integration time of 5 hours: 160 subs at Gain = 100 with an exposure time of 120 sec.
Pre-processed using Pixinsight's weighted batch pre-processing script (WBPP) to perform calibration, debayering, registration, local normalization, and integration. Background removed using GradXpert. Initial post-processing in Pixinsight: spectrophotometric color calibration, blur x terminator, and noise x terminator. Unscreened stars using StarXTerminator, then further processed the starless and stars images separately: generated rangemask and applied for subsequent steps for starless image, masked stretch, generalized hyperbolic stretch, HDR transformation using EasyHDR script, local histogram transformation, and color saturation adjustment, and lastly re-screened stars using PixelMath.
Original version: M106 OSC RGB image
Rev B: M106 OSC RGB image, starless version
Rev C: M106 OSC RGB image, inverted version
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