NGC 5128 (Centaurus A) -- 2 of 2 Central Dust Band

See part 1 (the whole galaxy) here: https://www.astrobin.com/vfwrwc/?nc=user

OTA: TAO 150 (f/7.3)

Camera: FLI - ML16200 (1.13 arcseconds/pixel)

Observatory: Deep Sky West, Chile

EXPOSURES:

Red: 9 x 900 sec.

Blue: 9 x 900

Green: 11 x 900

H 30 x 1800

L 10 x 300

L 23 x 900

Total exposure ~28.8 hours

Image Width: ~1.2 deg / ~20 min for Dust Lane Image

Processed by Alex Woronow (2020) using PixInsight, Skylum, Luminar, SWT*

Centaurus A is the 5th brightest galaxy in the sky. This galaxy, lying at a distance of ~12M light-years, is the nearest active-core galaxy (actively generating a plethora of new stars). It is called a “star-burst” galaxy and is an active radio-wave, X-ray, and gamma-ray emitter with a super-massive black hole at its center. Jets of aged stars and dust, streaming outward above and below the galactic plane, reach speeds approaching 50% the speed of light! Modeling suggests that the shape of this peculiar galaxy resulted from a collision and merging of a large elliptical galaxy with a smaller spiral galaxy**.

(Source: largely Wikipedia)

These Images: I usually do not drizzle images, but the seeing was so good, σ ~ 0.6 arcsec, that I tried it, and it payed off! The hurdle was the noise. I used the artificial intelligence program Denoise AI to cure that quickly and completely (see my video: https://vimeo.com/399468940).

So I made two images:

1) a full galaxy view (down-sampled 2x) -

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ej3aiyv9x4iiog/NGC5128_TAO150_DSW halfRes 80.jpg?dl=0

2) a focus on the dust lane -

https://www.dropbox.com/s/t9qvq5gtrvtwaju/NGC5128DistLane_TAO150_DSW.jpg?dl=0



I've also attached two thumbnails, but, really, take a look at the links above, and do it at full screen!

Unfortunately, sharing the images is problematic because of their high resolution. If anyone has a better idea the DropBox, please let me know.

*SWT (Subframe Weighting Tool) is an Excel Spreadsheet I developed for assigning weights to subframes based on user-selected image attributes and relative weights. SWT is available upon request: Alex(-at-)awkml.com.

**Many details can be perused in Internal Kinematics and Dynamics of Galaxies (p.334).