Cartwheel Galaxy
08-Nov-2018
Lying about 500 million light-years away in the constellation of Sculptor, the cartwheel shape of this galaxy is the result of a violent galactic collision.
A smaller galaxy has passed right through a large disk galaxy and produced shock waves that swept up gas and dust — much like the ripples produced when a stone is dropped into a lake — and sparked regions of intense star formation (appearing blue). The outermost ring of the galaxy, which is 1.5 times the size of our Milky Way, marks the shock wave’s leading edge. This object is one of the most dramatic examples of the small class of ring galaxies. (Source: NASA)
The galaxy that collided with the Cartwheel Galaxy is the small white galaxy seen far below and slightly left. It is currently 250,000 light years from the Cartwheel Galaxy (Source: APOD)
Image:
- 19x 600s red
- 25x 600s green
- 25x 600s blue
- 39x 600s luminance
Total integration 18 hours.
Hardware:
- Celestron 11" EdgeHD
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik UHC, deep sky RGB filters
- Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
- Starlight Xpress Active Optics
- Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
- Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II
Location:
- Imaged on 4 nights between September 18 and October 3, 2018.
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
- Captured with TheSkyX Professional
- Guiding with PHD2
- FocusLock live focusing
- PixInsight: Calibrate, align, stack, crop, dynamic background extraction, deconvolution, color calibration, reduce noise, LRGB combination, histogram stretch, HDR multiscale transform, curves.