M108 (NGC3556)
Published 13 June 2021
About this object
My friend and professional Keck Astronomer, Josh Walawender, shared data of M97 and M108 which he took with the 36" WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak in Dec 2003. He collected this data after their science targets had set for the night. I don't believe the data was ever assembled into a color image so I gave it a go. The image scale of the data is .423 arcsec/pixel.
The image above is a crop of a much larger field from the 8 CCD mosaic imager highlighting M108. Clicking on the image above will take you to the full resolution view. Also within the mosaic imagers field of view is M97. You can see the full resolution image here: M97_M108 Some uncharacterized noise caused some artifacts in the background which you can see in the full mosaic image and some of the brighter stars in the image have dark streaks going through them where the data was probably saturated and masked out.. None the less, the image shows M97 and M108 in their full glory and many faint background galaxies. The image exposure time was 93min.
M108 is a barred spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. It was discovered by Pierre Mechain in 1781-82. It's seen almost edge on and lies some 45.99 million light years distant.
My friend and professional Keck Astronomer, Josh Walawender, shared data of M97 and M108 which he took with the 36" WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak in Dec 2003. He collected this data after their science targets had set for the night. I don't believe the data was ever assembled into a color image so I gave it a go. The image scale of the data is .423 arcsec/pixel.
The image above is a crop of a much larger field from the 8 CCD mosaic imager highlighting M108. Clicking on the image above will take you to the full resolution view. Also within the mosaic imagers field of view is M97. You can see the full resolution image here: M97_M108 Some uncharacterized noise caused some artifacts in the background which you can see in the full mosaic image and some of the brighter stars in the image have dark streaks going through them where the data was probably saturated and masked out.. None the less, the image shows M97 and M108 in their full glory and many faint background galaxies. The image exposure time was 93min.
M108 is a barred spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. It was discovered by Pierre Mechain in 1781-82. It's seen almost edge on and lies some 45.99 million light years distant.
Image Details
- Optics : WIYN 36" (.9m) telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory
- Mount:
- Camera: Mosaic imager
- Filters: Harris RVB
- Exposure (min): R: 11x180s, V: 12x180s, B: 8x180s. 93min total
- Automation Control:
- Guiding:
- Processing Software: PixInsight
- Location: Kitt Peak National Observatory
- Sky:
- Date: 28 Dec 2003
- Credit: Josh Walawender, Processing: Jon Talbot
