Messier 109
M 109 is the most distant object in the Messier catalogue at 85 million light years. The blazing star to the upper right is Phecda, a more familiar object than you might think -- it's the bottom corner of the Big Dipper's bowl, on the handle side. That makes it one of the very few stars which can be seen by naked eye from my suburban yard. You can find 3 faint companion galaxies in the image and the annotator in PixInsight shows me about 30 more, but they're indistinguishable from faint stars in this casual deep sky image.
Tech Stuff: Borg 71FL/Borg 1.08X flattener/IDAS LPS-D2 filter/ZWO ASI1600MC camera. 4 second unguided exposures captured in SharpCap Livestacks; total integration time 100 minutes. From my Bortle 7 yard 10 miles north of New York City, SQM-L 18.6.
Messier 109
M 109 is the most distant object in the Messier catalogue at 85 million light years. The blazing star to the upper right is Phecda, a more familiar object than you might think -- it's the bottom corner of the Big Dipper's bowl, on the handle side. That makes it one of the very few stars which can be seen by naked eye from my suburban yard. You can find 3 faint companion galaxies in the image and the annotator in PixInsight shows me about 30 more, but they're indistinguishable from faint stars in this casual deep sky image.
Tech Stuff: Borg 71FL/Borg 1.08X flattener/IDAS LPS-D2 filter/ZWO ASI1600MC camera. 4 second unguided exposures captured in SharpCap Livestacks; total integration time 100 minutes. From my Bortle 7 yard 10 miles north of New York City, SQM-L 18.6.