Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1097 - Adam Lundie - Eatons Hill Observatory

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1097

18-Apr-2020
Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1097 thumbnail
Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1097
This southern sky barred spiral galaxy shines bright in the southern skies, from about 45 million light-years away.

NGC 1097 has a supermassive black hole at its center, which is 140 million times the mass of the Sun. Around the central black hole is a glowing ring of star-forming regions with a network of gas and dust that spirals from the ring to the black hole. An inflow of material toward the central bar of the galaxy causes new stars to be created in the ring. The ring is approximately 5,000 light-years in diameter, the spiral arms of the galaxy extend tens of thousands of light-years beyond the ring.

NGC 1097 has two satellite galaxies, NGC 1097A and NGC 1097B. Dwarf elliptical galaxy NGC 1097A is the larger of the two. It is a peculiar elliptical galaxy that orbits 42,000 light-years from the center of NGC 1097. Dwarf galaxy NGC 1097B (5 x 106 solar masses), the outermost one, was discovered by its HI emission, and appears to be a typical dwarf irregular. Little else is known about it.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_1097)

Image:

  • 74x 300s Luminance
  • 42x 300s Red
  • 40x 300s Green
  • 34x 300s Blue

Total integration 15 hours 50 minutes. Focal length: 2800mm

Hardware:

  • Celestron 11&qoute; EdgeHD
  • Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
  • QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
  • Astrodon LRGB Gen2 E-Series Tru-Balance filters
  • Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
  • Innovations Foresight ONAG
  • Starlight Instruments Feather Touch Focuser

Location:

  • Exposed over 6 nights between 26th October and 8th November 2019.
  • Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)

Software:

  • Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
  • Captured with TheSkyX Professional
  • Guiding with PHD2
  • PixInsight: Calibrate, align, integrate, dynamic background extraction, LRGB combination, noise reduction, photometric color calibration, histogram, HDR multiscale transform, curves, crop.

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