Image of the Month

NGC-891. A very striking edge-on spiral galaxy in Andromeda. Although visually it has very low surface brightness, it offers a striking view, with its curdled longitudinal dust lane. It is over 12 arc minutes in extent. At its distance of 40 million light years from Earth, this corresponds to an actual diameter of 120,000 light years. This is a 1 hour 24 minute integration of 3 minute exposures through the C-11 at f/6.3 using the Starizona SCT II reducer and the ZWO ASI 2600MC Pro CMOS color camera, operating at -15 below ambient & binned 1 X 1. Guided, captured & combined using Maxim DL5 Pro. Post processed using PhotoShop CS2, Gradient XTerminator, StarShrink, Carboni's Astro Tools, and NoiseWare.