Posted on 05/14/2011 9:29:56 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
[Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI / AURA)] Explanation: What's going on in the center of this spiral galaxy? Named the Sombrero Galaxy for its hat-like resemblance, M104 features a prominent dust lane and a bright halo of stars and globular clusters. Reasons for the Sombrero's hat-like appearance include an unusually large and extended central bulge of stars, and dark prominent dust lanes that appear in a disk that we see nearly edge-on. Billions of old stars cause the diffuse glow of the extended central bulge. Close inspection of the bulge in the above photograph shows many points of light that are actually globular clusters. M104's spectacular dust rings harbor many younger and brighter stars, and show intricate details astronomers don't yet fully understand. The very center of the Sombrero glows across the electromagnetic spectrum, and is thought to house a large black hole. Fifty million-year-old light from the Sombrero Galaxy can be seen with a small telescope towards the constellation of Virgo.
(Excerpt) Read more at apod.nasa.gov ...
It's just 19 minutes after midnight here, and I can get this day's topic out of the way, and go to bed. :')
|
wow.....just so much we don’t have any inkling about...
Near the bottom middle is a real cool image of conjoining galaxies.
Spectacular!
‘Night, Civ.
That pic has been around for a while but its one of the coolest ones out there.
To me, it looks more like a plate or a frisbee, rather than a Sombrero.
One more thing.....
I think its also interesting how this galaxy doesn’t appear to have spiraled arms like our home Galaxy and so many others.
The level of detail in the photo is incredible when you go out to the source site and then click on the photo again to get the large version. Galaxies, galaxies, and more galaxies.
The level of detail in the photo is incredible when you go out to the source site and then click on the photo again to get the large version. Galaxies, galaxies, and more galaxies.
/ditto
It could also be called the Roller Derby Galaxy.
Thank you, and after reading that I feel smarter too. :)
Looks kinda like the edge of a vortex, and- hey, wait a minute... ;’)
Super-Massive Black Holes suck!
Actually many galaxies throughout the cosmos are Elliptical. They are either giant balls, cocoons, or spindles. Many of the most massive galaxies we can see are elliptical galaxies.
NGC 3115 is a prime example, as is M87.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_morphological_classification is a nice article about galatic shapes.
This is M-51 Whirlpool spiral Galaxy, at about 35 million light years from Earth. Also seen are M51 companion galaxy NGC 5195, seen above M51.
SMT 10" SCT 35x120 second exposures @ISO 800 w/6.3 focal reducer and LP filters, calibrated and stacked in DSS.
The Whirlpool Galaxy is about 60 thousand light years across.
Very nice indeed!
I use to take pictures from my back yard, but, I couldn’t get anything like that. Too bright a sky, Black and White camera and just a regular equatorial mount, no goto.
We have a few folks in our club that are quite good at it now. It is almost like they are using point and shoot cameras any more. I keep telling them that the old guys back in the 1900s would have killed them for this setup.
Thanks for the nice comment.
BTW, going back to just early 1990s, most amateurs could not have imagined the coming digital technology would allow them to produce images close to what professional large research observatories were producing previously. Some of the work done by other amateurs today is really beyond belief, all made possible by the digital revolution.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
