Galaxies

NGC 7814 – The Little Sombrero Galaxy – TEC 140

NGC 7814
NGC 7814 - The Little Sombrero Galaxy

NGC 7814 is an edge-on spiral galaxy 40 million light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus.  IT is nicknamed “The Little Sombrero” because of its likeness to The Sombrero Galaxy M104 in Virgo.  Close examination of the picture reveals many tiny galaxies, up to a billion light years away in the depths of The Universe.

The dust lanes of the edge-on spiral arms can be easily seen.

Image Technical Data

NGC 7814 is very remote and so needs a long integration (exposure) time.  This image was captured from my backyard observatory in Nottingham, UK over the course of three nights in October 2019 (a very wet period in the UK and the capture nights were 2,17 and 24).  It took significant dedication to capture the subframes for this image given the dreary weather circumstances  and I nearly gave up on several occasions!  I used my TEC 140 refractor with Atik 460 cooled CCD camera with Astrodon E Series Generation 2 filters on my OAG guided MESU 200 mount.

Integration is a total of nine hours comprised of:

Luminance > 22 x 900s binned 1×1 ; Red > 17 x 300s 2×2 ; Green > 14 x 300s 2×2 ; Blue > 14 x 300s 2×2

Image capture in Sequence Generator Pro and processing in PixInsight and Photoshop CC.  The bright star to the top centre is very difficult to control. This star is of course a foreground star in our own galaxy and is millions of times nearer to the Earth than the galaxy.

NGC 7814 Annotated
NGC 7814 Annotated
NGC 7814 Inverted
NGC 7814 Inverted

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