Galaxies will always be my favorite targets. There is just something far more humbling when it comes to capturing light emanating from objects that are tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of light years away, with some specks being even much farther than that. Backyard Astrophotography is challenging because we don't typically chose our backyards based on our skies that we live under. Being in south Texas, I still feel significantly more fortunate than fellow Astrophotographers up north or in Europe who have been describing often months of cloudy nights. That being said as much as I was excited overall about galaxy season, it gets quickly dampened by the endless cloudy nights, and the few clear nights will fall under bright moons and poor seeing. I certainl wished my seeing conditions during Galaxy season were as good as they were during my summer season. 

There is a lot to explore in this image. The following crops were down sampled to keep them reasonable in size by 50%. For the full resolution please study the image above.

First is M106 itself, the star of the show. The Ha data helped show the interesting Ha jet that is emanating out of the center of the M106. At nearly 24 million light years away, it is a fascinating galaxy roughly equivalent in size to Andromeda, with extensive star formation activity. 



Next up is the companion galaxy to M106, NGC 4248. Even despite the small apparent size of this companion galaxy there are Ha areas that can be discerned in this tiny galaxy that is 24 million light years away.



These two galaxies are also interesting, NGC 4232 and 4231. There are nearly 350 million light years away. Apparently they were discovered by Wilhelm Herschel on 9 March 1788. With an angular extent of about 1.5 arc minutes, they are quite small and with a brightness of 15 magnitudes they are very faint. The fact that they were seen at that time is incredible. If only he knew that these are entirely different galaxies hundreds of millions of light years away. 


Last but not least is the is beautiful edge on galaxy NGC4217. Its perfect orientation to us helped Hubble demonstrate dozens of tentacle-like filaments that are denser than their surroundings, with dozens of dust structures some of which reach as far as 7,000 light-years away from the central plane. :



This was a great journey around this interesting part of our night sky, and will continue to revisit this image in the future.

CS!