Noel is getting all the data prepared for the coffee-table book and is now mopping up stuff from last year. Here we have an updated image of M31.
The basis of this image was actually first light for the M25C way back on Fri 22nd September 2006! Five and a half hours of RGB using 4-minute subs, and Noel having to work enormous magic to get the right colour as the firmware hex file was not correct for the M25C at the time!!!
We then go to 2007 for, Wed 3rd Oct 2007, 2 hours using 20-minute subs H-alpha – Sat 6th Oct 2007, 2.5 hours 450 second subs RGB – Wed 17th Oct 2007, 4 hours 35 minutes using 750 second subs RGB – and finally Fri 2nd November 2007, 6 hours and 12 minutes using 6-minute subs RGB. Grand total 20 hours 47 minutes. Obsessive? Moi?
Noel has just informed me that I missed one session out! On Thursday 15th November 2007 I also captured 5 hours and 20-minutes of H-alpha data using 20-minute subs. That now brings the running total to just 7-minutes over 26 hours!!!
Wow.
How you keep the inky black sky is amazing…
I spent some time doing galaxy dynamics, as it were.
I can see the innermost dust belt is being ripped around too fast for star clouds to form.
And what about those tendrils close to the right? are they falling into the nucleus or being pushed out, or arching over?
Not to mention the supergiants further out…
The spokes (or tendrils) to the right are very interesting and only tend to show up in deep images of M31. The H-alpha was very useful in bringing out all the “red stuff”.