At first glance, this image might not look like much. After all, It doesn't appear to be more than just a bunch of stars. And due to optical aberrations, the stars don't even look that good. If you look a bit closer though, you'll start to find gems hidden among those stars.
My first hint that there was more to this image than initially meets the eye was finding this wee little speck of light near the edge of the frame
It absolutely blew my mind when I realized that this was M104, the Sombrero Galaxy!
After plate solving, I punched the RA and Dec coords into Stellarium to pull up a frame of reference. I was able to identify
95 galaxies within this 30 x 20 degree field of view. Most of these galaxies are grouped together in the right half of the frame as part of the
Virgo Southern Extension, a galaxy cloud extending from and situated relatively south of the Virgo Supercluster. This is by no means an exhaustive account of all the galaxies within this frame of reference. There are most certainly more.
This all started out as just a random exercise. With no particular target in mind, and no expectations. All I had available to work with at the time was this little wind-up mechanical sky tracker, and my trusty Fuji X-T100. I had a clear night, and I didn't want to waste it.
After getting set up, I picked out a bright star overhead, pointed the camera in the same general direction, and let 'er rip. I wasn't really expecting to find much. Was just curious to see what might be lurking out there, waiting in the dark to be found. Seeing the result absolutely boggles my mind.
I'm considering this exercise a scouting survey for future imaging sessions. I'd like to return to this area of the sky to capture a few targets at longer focal lengths. Using this survey, I've made up a short list of targets that I thought looked interesting, including:
1) The Sombrero Galaxy,
M104, NGC 4594 (Mag 8.00)
2) The Dust Devil Galaxy,
NGC 4753 (Mag 9.95)
3) The Vinyl LP Galaxy,
NGC 4699 (Mag 11.51)
4)
Arp 271, NGC 5426 (Mag 12.60) and NGC 5427 (Mag 13.96)
5)
NGC 4697 (Mag 10.97)
6)
NGC 5247 (Mag 10.77)
Technically speaking, the quality of this capture is relatively poor. Although, considering the challenges I faced, I think it turned out decently well. Stars are poorly shaped because I opted to keep the aperture as wide open as possible at f/5.6 with a focal length of 45mm. Star shapes would significantly improve at f/8, but that also means having to double the exposure time due to the additional stop. With the Omegon MiniTrack LX3 sky tracker being limited to just 60 minutes of tracking between windings, I didn't have much time to work with. Exposure time was set to just 30 seconds, primarily because the Fuji X-T100 is limited to 30 second exposure time maximum when using the built in intervalometer. In any case, time wasn't on my side.
As far as tracking goes, the Omegon MiniTrack LX3 did exceptionally well. I saw no star trailing in the majority of light frames. Stars only began to trail at the end of the 60 minute window when the mechanical timer wound down.
Stacking and processing was done using Astro Pixel Processor. Noise reduction was performed in Photoshop using the Camera Raw Filter.
Annotations were done manually in Photoshop while using Stellarium as reference. This was an extremely time consuming and resource intensive project. I was only able to finish this project after moving the project over to a more capable computer as Photoshop utilizes nearly 4 GB of RAM. The Photoshop document itself is 587 MB in size, and consists of 223 layers in 18 groups.
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