Located approximately 50 million light-years away in the constellation Draco is an edge-on spiral galaxy known as NGC 5906 also known as NGC 5907. It also goes by the Splinter Galaxy and less commonly the Knife Edge Galaxy. It is a little bigger than our own galaxy at 180,000 light-years across and is known to be composed mainly of stars with low metallicity which means most of the stars have only hydrogen and helium and little else.
I started imaging this after reading
Gary Imm's writeup for his excellent version of this. In his description he mentioned tidal streams discovered in 2006. I thought it might be cool to capture those streams. However, after doing more research I discovered they were captured by
R.J. GaBany who specializes in these tidal streams and often works with professional astronomers (
GaBany Image). I searched Astrobin and only found a couple of other images that somewhat show these and they were from very dark sites. Other images from astrophotographers much better than myself do not show the streams so I decided to forget this and go with the main part of the galaxy.
Despite the lack of streams it does have some interesting structure in that it appears elongated with many intersecting dust lanes especially on the right side of my image. Lastly, this hopefully should be the last image which shows the menacing blips on some of the larger stars caused by loose a connection on my mount. I had a long talk with my quality control person who is responsible for setting up my equipment.
Dates: 4-8, 4-12, 4-13
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