Sombrero Galaxy (M104)

L: 12x5', RGB: 4x5' each channel
Total: 2 hours

On Saturday April 24th, since I had to wait over 3 hours for Rho Op. to show up, to "kill" time I captured some data from M104 (Sombrero Galaxy) and later some from M63 (not shown in this entry) with the FSQ 1.6x extender. What you see up there is a rotated crop at the original image size.

It was the first time I was using the extender and I only ran one V-curve with FocusMax, so the focusing wasn't great. In addition to that, in the middle of the session a really gusty wind started to blow for over 1 hour. Guiding became a bit jumpy at that time, but surprisingly all subs were usable.

800mm FL - which is what I get with the extender, plus f/8 focal ratio - is not the best focal length for this object, but I figured I'd try it with the FSQ extender to see what came out.

Oh and I didn't frame the object incorrectly. The original field is huge and what you see is a rotated & cropped version. I don't know... I felt like tilting the galaxy and placing it on the side. If you want to see a reduced version of the original stretched luminance, click on the image, and you'll see how little space the galaxy actually occupies in the field of view.