M105 and neighbors

On the right is M105, a giant eliptical galaxy with a massive black hole in the center. With an 8" telescope in my back yard, you can't see the spiffy X-Ray jets the black hole is shooting tens of thousands of light years, unfortunately. On the other hand, if we could see them with an 8" scope in my back yard, that might not be so good either.

On its upper left is another eliptical, NGC 3384, and the cute little spiral to the left is NGC 3373, also known as NGC 3389. No doubt there is an interesting story about who is still arguing over which object goes with which catalog entry (indeed, even at least one Messier object is still debated after more than 200 years), but I don't know it, And I don't feel like finding out right now anyway.

All three of these galaxies lie right under Leo's belly, just above M95 and M96, and are part of the M96 group, also called the Leo I Group. The whole lot of them are just a few degrees away from the Leo Triplets that I posted pictures of earlier. I can't quite fit these in the same frame as M95 and M96. I did shoot those a couple of nights ago, but managed to somehow ruin the images. (I've been pretty sick for about a week; I set up the scope a couple of times, then dressed up like an Eskimo and went to sleep looking at the stars. I also tried to process the images while feeling pretty bad-and deleted all the reference frames.) I may or may not post them later. In larger scopes, you can start to see that many of the stars around these three are in turn galaxies as well; it's a remarkable area...but in a month or so, Virgo will be in prime shooting range, and the galaxy fields there put all else to shame.

Last night I also got my final set of 4-second subs of the Trapezium in Orion; it's too late in the year to re-shoot the longer exposures I did a couple of months ago with more useful alignments. The main problem was that I failed to allow for the actual size of what my little scope would capture, and half the nebula is cut off, like the way bad photographers cut people's foreheads off. Well, I'll be ready next winter, at any rate, and at least I have a well-framed set to start building the project on next year. The Orion Nebula and the Eta Carina Nebula are two that are so bright and large that they can only really be shown in composite pictures.