M77 Galaxy

Reprocessed 1/4/05



This galaxy is located in the Cetus (The Whale) constellation and is approximately 60 million light years away. The photons that fell upon the ccd chip to make up this image were created around the time that dinosaurs roamed the earth!

This is a small spiral galaxy seen face on, one of the so called Seyfert galaxies, which in this case means it has a radio source probably caused by matter falling into a black hole. It is receding from us at about 1100 miles per second. Actually saying this is a small galaxy is a misnomer. It looks small but in fact it is very large. When you include the outlying gasious areas it's about 170,000 light years across. Almost twice as large as our Milky Way.

This image was taken from my front driveway on 11/13/04 at 1:00 am est with my new atk-2hs webcam. The small image below is with some false color added. The negative image beside it shows that M77 is larger than it first appears and in fact, its gasious envelope is almost as big as the galaxy itself.

Techno Stuff: 11/13/04 at 1:00am est (6:00am ut), LX-90 8" sct, baader ir, atk-2hs, gain 100% gamma 0% saturation 50% brightness 50% white
balance-outside, 22 frames out of 70 processed in k3ccdtools, registax
and photoshop, dark frames used



©2006 Richard Murray

M27 the Dumbell Nebula

©2006 Richard Murray

M27 has the distinction of being the first planetary nebula ever discovered, by Charles Messier on July 12, 1764. It's interesting to note that we are seeing this nebula face on rather than edge on. If we were to see it edge on it would probably look very similar to M57 the Ring Nebula (see my Archives: 8/8/04-8/14/04 on the left). This is a relatively young nebula being only 3000 to 4000 years old.

It also contains on its outskirts a variable star, referred to as the 'Goldilocks Variable' which was discovered by Leos Ondra. He found the variable quite by accident while looking at two different 1990 magazine covers that both featured a picture on their covers of M27. One picture had the variable star in it and the other did not even though the pictures were taken only a few months apart. Talk about serendipity! I've pointed out where the variable star is located with two arrows in the negative image above. So the fun part of all this is that in a matter of several months this star can actually disappear from view and then gradually brighten again. Now you see it, now you don't.

This has been one of the more difficult objects for me to image and I'm glad I was finally able to show this unique nebula.


Techno Stuff: 11/6/04 at 8:29pm est (1:29am ut), LX-90 8" sct, baader
ir filter, atk-2hs, gain 80% gamma 0% saturation 50% brightness 50% white
balance-outside, 14 frames used out of 25 taken, processed in k3ccdtools,
registax and photoshop, dark frames used. I increased the blue channel
with selective color in Photoshop. The negative was created in IrfanView
and contrast boosted in Photoshop.