Last week was not so good in terms of weather, but over three nights I was able to collect some exposures for the picture above. Left part is occupated by the M106 galaxy. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in year 1781 and is placed at distance about 25 million light years. It is spiral galaxy in Canes Venatici constellation. It is also a Seyfert galaxy which means it is suspected that part of the galaxy is falling into a supermassive black hole in the center. The mass of this black hole is estimated for 40 million solar masses. NGC4217 galaxy seen in the bottom right is a possible companion of M106. In the whole picture there is a whole lot of other faint and even fainter galaxies. 25 million years that separates us from M106 is not really far in cosmological terms, so what this entry title comes from? Well, take a look into the second picture:
You can see two enlarged parts. The upper one shows some faint chain of objects, that could be the stars. But when checked at SSDS sky server it turned out that this is very distant galaxy cluster. The measured redshift of this cluser is 0.273, that means this cluster is over 3 billion light years away.
The plot thickens…
The bottom enlarged part shows lonely galaxy in the upper right subframe part. This one has been identified in SSDS with redshift 0.349. That value corresponds to the distance about 4 billion light years! So 160 times further than M106. And the picture has been taken from the backyard using 6″ newtonian scope.
You can do it.
Exposure details: GSO 6″ F5 newtonian, Atik314L+ camera, LRGB 300:60:60:60 minutes, bin 1:2:2:2 over three different nights due to weather and short nights.
Clear skies!
