NGC 1055

NGC 1055 is an edge-on spiral galaxy located in the constellation Cetus. It has a percular dark lane of dust and gas that appears to be elevated above the galaxy's plane, almost blending away from the central plane. If you look carefully, several bright Ha areas can be easily seen.

 

The galaxy is fairly small in my instrument as it is only has an apparent size of 7'.6 × 2'.7 arc min. NGC 155 is 52 million light years away, and has a diameter of about 115,800 light years across. The apparent size is 7.6 X 2.7 arc min with an apparent magnitude of 11.4. It’s a fairly dramatic looking galaxy with an incrediable glow around it.

 

Now for the inner geek stuff. The guiding is performed with a SBIG Remote guide head. It may be old, by it’s really a nice bit of kit having its own shutter and TEC cooler. The chip measures 4.86 X 3.66 mm in size, giving it a field of view of 7.31 by 5.5 arc minutes. Normally I struggle to find a guide star to place on the guide chip. So, it’s fairly small, but in this case, the galaxy presented would fit diagonally on the guide chip. Hopefully, this helps to convey the size of this galaxy shown above. It's so cool to think that this galaxy would just squeeze onto the guide chip of this rig. :)

 

Exposure Details:

 

Lum 35X900

Red 26X450

Green 16X450

Blue 16X450

Ha 17X1800

Total time 24.5 hours

 

Instruments Used:

10 Inch RCOS fl 9.1

Astro Physics AP-900 Mount

SBIG STL 11000m

FLI Filter Wheel

Astrodon Lum, Red, Green, Blue Filters

Baader Planetarium H-alpha 7nm Narrowband-Filter

 

Software Used

 

CCDStack (calibration, alignment, data rejection, stacking)

Photoshop CS 6 (Image processing)

 

Thanks for looking

 

Done