The forces of rotation caused red hot masses of stones to be torn away from the Earth and to be thrown into the ether, and this is the origin of the stars.

— Anaxagoras 428 BC

M104_Sombrero Galaxy

By ebfaulkner6a at Sun, 05/31/2009 - 3:31pm
M104_Sombrero Galaxy

While some of you were enjoying Riker Hill observing I was out with my Orion 80ED taking images of the Sombrero Galaxy (42 min less time than I wanted due to trees) and M51 just under one hour exposure. This was one of the absolutely dark, clear and possible clearest night of late, on a scale of 10, no doubt a 10. The edge on dark line shows much better in this image than previous Sombrero images I have taken. Hope you like it. Also in the image to the lower left is another galaxy, magnitude 13.7 NGC 4562.