…a lovely galaxy that lives in the head of Leo, the lion. Here’s my new and improved version – like it? It’s still not perfect, but I took one of these before the autoguiding camera and new motors and it’s not a patch on this picture. You can see the smudge of light coming from galaxy UGC 5806 (thanks barnfieldbob) and a couple more faint, tiny (I suspect I really mean distant) galaxies to the lower right. This galaxy is surprisingly easy to see and should have been picked up by Charles Messier before William Herschel discovered it. You can see a giant nebula within this galaxy – NGC 2905, which (I think) is the blob just off to the lower right. The galaxy is classified as SBd (barred spiral) because there is a diffuse, broken bright white bar full of star clusters and nebulae across the centre.
Sunday 6 February 2011
The lion's head galaxy
…a lovely galaxy that lives in the head of Leo, the lion. Here’s my new and improved version – like it? It’s still not perfect, but I took one of these before the autoguiding camera and new motors and it’s not a patch on this picture. You can see the smudge of light coming from galaxy UGC 5806 (thanks barnfieldbob) and a couple more faint, tiny (I suspect I really mean distant) galaxies to the lower right. This galaxy is surprisingly easy to see and should have been picked up by Charles Messier before William Herschel discovered it. You can see a giant nebula within this galaxy – NGC 2905, which (I think) is the blob just off to the lower right. The galaxy is classified as SBd (barred spiral) because there is a diffuse, broken bright white bar full of star clusters and nebulae across the centre.
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