ESO 350-40: An Unconventional Cartwheel Galaxy (Mathew Ludgate)

ESO 350-40: An Unconventional Cartwheel Galaxy

This was fun project I recently completed. I had seen some great images of the very small Cartwheel Galaxy taken with very large scopes including amazing images from Hubble and JWST. I have been pretty pleased with the resolution I have achieved with some prior images taken with my Nikon 400mm lens and thought it would be interesting to see what my setup could achieve on such a challenging small target. So I embarked on this image shooting a very small galaxy with a very unconventional galaxy scope!

The Cartwheel galaxy is 500 million lightyears away. It has a striking ring structure which is thought to be the results of a head-on collision with a smaller galaxy. This resulted in a powerful gravitational shockwave that expanded outwards through the galaxy creating its unique structure. This shockwave swept up and compressed dust and gas, resulting in starburst activity which can been seen in the blue outer ring.

The Cartwheel galaxy is part of a group of 4, with its 3 companions (named G1-3) visible in the image. G3 is the more distant galaxy positioned at ~10 o’clock to the main group and is thought to be the galaxy that plunged through the Cartwheels disc causing the gravitational disruption.

For this image I captured 20 hours of data and this was processed using drizzle integration. I did use BlurX set to a fairly high 0.70 and used some Unsharp Mask sharpening in PS. The final image was also upsized in PS using nearest neighbour resampling. While there aren’t a lot of finer scale features resolved, I did manage to resolve the inner nucleic ring, the outer ring and the connecting spokes which is better than I initially expected. The image could do with some additional integration time to help control noise and better resolve the numerous groups of faint distant galaxies that are visible across the field.

Camera Lens Astrophotography
Unique or Unusal Deep Sky Targets

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8600244
PixInsight job	T54561MHJV61ZB9B9BQ2XAS4H0F2K5MZ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h37m36s.738
RA (top/left)	00h37m54s.619
RA (top/right)	00h36m19s.400
RA (bottom/right)	00h37m18s.792
RA (bottom/left)	00h38m53s.993

Dec (center)	-33°46′41″.99
Dec (top/left)	-33°31′02″.60
Dec (top/right)	-33°47′44″.15
Dec (bottom/right)	-34°02′21″.44
Dec (bottom/left)	-33°45′37″.29

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):