Hi friends,

Team Omicron ( David Vernet, Serge Brunier and I) has come to the end of an extraordinary job that we are very proud to present to you. This image is the result of hundreds of hours of work, between the relentless shots of David and Serge spread over 4 months and the progressive processings carried out regularly to orient the shots and decide what to do.


Before giving it to you, this image has a little history. We talked about it the first time with David and Serge during the C2PU missions in November 2021. I really wanted to image this object for its loop and its tidal tail. A test in December, low on the horizon, showed that it was accessible, but that it would take a long time. From then on, I couldn't stop them. We started machine-gunning. Sometimes with a seeing of the order of a second, or even less.

The image is composed of :

- 52 hours of luminance retained over 63 hours (3124 minutes exactly). Without filter, with the QHY 600 at the focus of the T 1000 Omicron at F/3.3.
- 3x1 hour of RGB and 1 hour of near infrared to "color" the faint galaxies.
- 30 darks and 181 "nightflats" of 60 s instead of normal flats, which made it possible to optimize the correction of the sky background
- 150 h of processing. At least 5 finalized intermediate versions have been produced and around fifty reviews and others.

It is estimated at magnitude 26.7 at the limit and close to 30 mag/arcsec2 for objects with low surface brightness (loop and tail). The field shows around 60 000 galaxies.

As a result, not only did we caught the loop and the tail , but there are nuances of structures, very clearly visible. In addition, the one that is often presented as a spindle, here shows a magnificent leaning spiral structure, the winding of which is obvious. I had never seen this effect before.

There are nearly no stars in this field, 98% of what you see are galaxies !

here are some views intended to encourage you to open the MUST SEE full of 8000 pixels.







Finally, here is a reduced and inverted version highlighting the loop and the tail . We see the differences in contrast and the structure of these extensions in a remarkable way.




Hope you will enjoy this tribute to NGC 5907. I personally think it has never been so deeply imaged from earth. Thank you so much to the C2PU team JP Rivet, D.Vernet and also S.Brunier for this fantastic cooperation.

CREDIT : C2PU / David Vernet / Serge Brunier / JF Bax.

JF