Earlier on the night of the 7th May I took some images of the intermediate spiral galaxy M106 in Canes Venatici (the hunting dogs):-
The above picture (binned x2) was taken with a Celestron NexStar 102 SLT with a Nikon D90 at prime focus. The galaxy is in a wide (2.07x1.38 degree) field and sits just off centre to the left. North is towards the bottom right-hand corner. Unfortunately, even though this image consists of 25x30s at ISO3200 only the central portion of the galaxy is visible. There are low surface brightness spiral arms that extend out much further and the object covers something like a third of a degree (you can click on this image to get an enlarged view). The first frame was taken at 21:54 UT and the last at 22:16 UT and so just before the end of astronomical twilight. The images were processed in DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop.
Other galaxies can also be seen on this image, in particular NG4217 which sits close to a group of foreground stars at the lower left of the picture. There is also NGC4248, NGC4232 and NGC4231 which lie closer to M106. A crop of the original unbinned image is shown below:-
I have processed this to show some hint of the low surface brightness spiral arms that extend to the upper left and lower right. The galaxy NGC4248 can be seen at lower left. A more visible spiral arm of M106 can be seen emerging from the central regions at the 5 o'clock position.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2023
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