The new telescope mount, the CEM70, failed in the cold weather and it took over a month before I finally hauled it into the house. Once it had warmed up it started working again… I lost the month of February with that issue. Admittedly the temperature was below the rated operating temperature for nearly that entire month.
So in March the equipment was ready but the skies weren’t clear. Eventually on the 20’th we had a bit of clear weather.
The first image here is NGC4244, also known as the “Silver Needle Galaxy”. The image was captured on March 21, 2022 at Lac Teeples with the RASA11 telescope on the CEM70, with the ZWO ASI6200 camera.
NGC4244 is a spiral galaxy appearing in the Canes Venatici constellation (the hunting dogs constellation). It is part of a galaxy group which is itself not too far from our local group. That said, it is around 14 million light-years away from us. Our neighbor galaxy Andromeda is around 2.5 million light-years away. It looks like a silver needle because we are seeing it edge-on. Because this galaxy is nearby my image is of quite good quality and many details can be seen, including individual stars bright spots (nebulae) and dust lanes. The galaxy has an apparent size of 17 arcminutes by 2 arcminutes.
M106 is the next galaxy here, also in the Canes Venatici constellation. Number 106 in the Messier catalog of disappointing objects that are not comets. This irregular spiral galaxy is not quite face-on but we get a good view of the structure. In fact we see some very odd and murky structure near the galaxy core. A smaller galaxy appears below it in this image, likely the cause of the irregular patterns in M106. M106 is at a distance of approximately 24 million light-years, relatively close to us, and therefore it appears relatively large at 19 by 7 arcminutes.
The image of M106 was captured on March 22, 2022 at Lac Teeples with the RASA11 telescope on the CEM70, with the ZWO ASI6200 camera. This image results from stacking 229 separate 60 second images.
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