Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  M 106  ·  NGC 4248  ·  NGC 4258

Image of the day 06/01/2016

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    M106 HaLRGB, Josh Smith
    M106 HaLRGB
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    M106 HaLRGB

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    Description

    This was a fun target to wrap up my galaxy season. I may revisit it with some more lum and or my new IR filter, but I'm happy enough with where it ended up to move on. What an interesting galaxy. I shot this one time a couple of years ago and was fortunate enough to grab a supernova at that point. This time around, with a little more experience and a lot more patience, I wanted to go after some of the background galaxies as well as the very interesting Ha jets in the region. While the data is not as clean or deep as I typically wish to achieve, it's time to focus on some other fun projects I'd like to hit over the summer.

    The Ha jets are thought to have formed from shockwaves along the lines of the radio waves and X-ray expulsions originating at the galaxies black hole. The size of those is then incredible! As much as 10-15,000 light years long. Another interesting tidbit via NASA's APOD is that M106 is a maser galaxy. It has a dense disk that works as a maser (Microwave Amplifier by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). A maser is a microwave laser, or a laser that operates in microwave instead of visible light, on a galactic scale. The nuclear megamaser ring, which made it possible to directly measure distance to a galaxy for the first time, is responsible for M106’s purple colour. This is all before we even look at the crazy number of galaxies in the background.

    As always, thanks for looking and your C&C's are very much appreciated!

    Version A: Channels Described in GIF (wrong channels attached)

    Version B: HaLRGB combination

    Version C: shows corrected channels in GIF

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      M106 HaLRGB, Josh Smith
      Original
      M106 HaLRGB, Josh Smith
      C

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    M106 HaLRGB, Josh Smith