Daily Image
21-02-2013
A beautiful barred spiral galaxy
| Submitter: | Albert van Duin |
| Description: | NGC 2903 is a beautiful barred spiral galaxy, about 20 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. It was discovered by William Herschel, who cataloged it on November 16, 1784. Charles Messier missed it completely when he compiled his famous catalog, although it is bright enough to have been found by him. Around the central bar, there is an area with a lot of dust. There seems to be a lot of star formation going on in a 200 light-year radius around the center, probably triggered by the gravitation of the central bar. This image was made during a cold winter night in Beilen (near Dwingeloo) in January 2013. Sixty 3-minute integrations were made, 30 in white light and 10 each in red, green and blue light. The imaging telescope was a 40cm F/4.5 (1800mm focal length) Newtonian. Image processing was done entirely using PixInsight, software developed for astronomical image processing. The result is an LRGB image showing the yellow and blue colours of the different star populations and also the pink star-forming regions. |
| Copyright: | http://astropix.nl |
| Tweet |  |