A magnificent spiral galaxy with TEC 140 and Atik 460 Many astronomers consider NGC 2903 the best and brightest galaxy that isn’t included in the famous Messier list and are surprised Messier himself didn’t include it in his catalogue.  It is very photogenic and brighter than several other galaxies that are included in Messier’s list such as M65 and M66.  It is located in Leo to the right of the “sickle” of Leo and is about 30 million light years distant. Full resolution image here (opens in a new tab). If you open the full resolution image you will see many tiny, remote galaxies in the depths of the Universe. Technical Detail Imaged with my TEC140 telescope and Atik 460 CCD camera with Astrodon E series LRGB filters on the 25th and 26th March 2022.  The data set is as follows with the luminance binned 1×1 and the RGB at…

M108 is a galaxy about 45 million light years away in the constellation of Ursa Major.  It is sometimes called the surfboard galaxy because of its resemblance to a surfboard.  Note the huge number of tiny, distant galaxies in the background.  These are hundreds and in some cases up to two billion light years away from us. Technical Information I imaged M108 from my backyard observatory in Nottingham, UK on 4-5 April 2021 (two imaging sessions) when M108 was almost directly overhead.  Conditions were very cold and frosty with good seeing and transparency. I used my TEC140 refractor and Atik 460 CCD camera with Astrodon E series Gen LRGB filters (1.25″).  There is almost 9.5 hours of data in this image consisting of:Lum > 42 x 300s; Red > 24 x 300s; Green > 24x300s; Blue 24 x 300sEverything was binned 1×1.  Image data was captured using Sequence Generator Pro software…