M104 - The Sombrero Galaxy
An unusual nearly edge-on (6 degrees off-axis) galaxy with a wide outer dust lane and a bright core which the
3.6 meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope at Mauna Kea indicates houses a 1 billion solar mass black hole.

  • RA:12:40
  • Dec: -11:37
  • Size: 9' x 4'
  • Magnitude: 8.3
  • Distance: 50 million ly
  • Constellation: Virgo
  • Millennium Star Atlas: Vol. II, p. 820-1
  • Scope: 12.5" Ritchey-Chretien at f/9
  • Autoguider: unguided
  • Sky conditions: excellent seeing at start, lousy by end
  • Film: FLI Dream Machine CCD
  • Exposure: 15x40 seconds L, 7,6,5x240 seconds R,G,B
  • Date: 4-13-01 luminance and 4-9-03 color

For the original shot, things started out pretty well but the seeing went rapidly downhill with the rapid approach of a storm system. As a result, to save time I used a 2x2 binned RGB color frame that frankly didn't work out to well in terms of image quality. I finally got a chance to reshoot the color data 4-9-2003 and applied it to the original luminance frame.


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