NGC 5128 galaxy

Meet NGC 5128 a starbusrt galaxy. Discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop who at the time lived ine in Parramatta, in New South Wales, Australia.

This image is the result of a collaboration opportunity I had with a Mr. Russ Jacob from Australia. Russ is an astrophotographer and images the southern hemisphere night sky.

The data consists of 10 hours of LRGB taken with a Skywatcher 8″ reflector, ASI 1600MM Pro cooled cmos camera and Astronomics filters.

I processed the data in Pixinsight. It was actually a lot of fun to process this image. Not only is the data of very high quality but I don’t always get to process deep sky objects not visible in the northern hemisphere night sky.

NGC 5128 is also known as Centaurus A. It’s a starburst galaxy and a collision is suspected to be cause of its intense burst of star formation. Models have suggested that Centaurus A was once a large elliptical galaxy that collided and merged with a smaller spiral galaxy.

At the center of this galaxy is a supermassive blackhole with the equivalent of 55 million solar masses! It’s also a source of strong radio and xray emissions. 

Technical:

10 hours total

L-R-G-B Astronomic filters

Skywatcher 8″ F5 reflector

ZWO ASI1600mm pro cooled cmos camera

NEQ6 Skywatcher mount

Acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro SGP / PHD2 for autoguiding

Processing: Pixinsight

 

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