M65 - An Easy Life - Deep Sky Videos

every galaxy we see in the sky is different they share a morphological structure and as an astro imager it's nice to be able to use image processing techniques some which I've developed myself as well to actually show the full range of the personality of these galaxies smaller galaxies are my favorites of course because there's such dynamic things so m65 is a spiral galaxy even more in particular it's a type s a spiral galaxy which is the classification that we give it to indicate basic information about its shape and distribution of stars it is like our own Milky Way roughly composed of a disk of stars and dust with a quite a prominent central bulge of stars so essentially it looks like fried egg but we are seeing it very highly inclined so instead of seeing this nice round circular object you're seeing something that is very elliptical in shape and that's because it's tilted with respect to our line of sight image processing is something of a dark art I mean back in the days of film won't believe this was taken the dynamic range of film was such that to capture the outer parts of the spiral galaxy the core would necessarily be overexposed so we grew up expecting to see m65 looking like this kind of long cigar shape almost with the bright core this is an image I took of it using the 2 meter Fox telescope on Hawaii the observatories located at an altitude of 9,000 feet under very very dark skies and on this particular night the seeing conditions were great with the processing steps that we can use once we've acquired the data we can for example withhold the brighter areas around the core of the galaxy and at the same time boost the fainter outer spiral arms so by applying those sort of techniques to this galaxy Minden we could get a very different view m65 doesn't live alone in the universe like most galaxies in fact it has a few companions so it lives in what we call the Leo triplet of galaxies these are quite pretty galaxies three galaxies near each other in space and not too far away from us so these two galaxies are both spiral galaxies' but they actually despite the fact that they are in close physical proximity to each other look quite different in m65 the spiral arms are quite tightly wound in m66 they're much looser and actually a bit asymmetric indicating that m-66 has been the subject of some drive-by encounter with another galaxy but I want to point out another difference which is in the type of stars that are in these galaxies if you ignore the dust lanes in this galaxy for a moment the rest of the stellar distribution is really quite smooth it's not very lumpy whereas in this galaxy you see lots of bright points of light indicating that's where stars are being born that's where bright nebulae are happening gas is collapsing and being transformed into new stars whereas here this appears to be a galaxy that has been undisturbed it's not been poked it's not been prodded it's using up all its gas turning into stars and then just live in kind of a quiet life if you're working with a digital SLR camera if you're imaging something like the Orion Nebula in 40 so then one thing that a lot of amateurs do is take short and long exposures and blend them together but with this the dynamic range of modern CCD is so good that the the whole range of pixels is included in their image and it's just a sip relatively straightforward case to tell the processing software just to withhold the brighter core pixel values and simultaneously boost the outer spiral arm the fainter pixels for me that's always the goal of image processing is to be able to show structure within the core which would normally be kind of overexposed or burnt out as well as the faint outer parts of the spiral arms this is actually a kind of galaxy that we here in Nottingham are interested in learning more about because several of us in this group are interested to know how when and why galaxies switch off their star formation how they transform and how they are influenced from outside factors and these types of galaxies are interesting because they appear to be illustrating what happens when you just take a galaxy and let it evolve and run its course and the contrast here is quite striking because these two galaxies are next-door to each other you would think they would probably have similar evolutionary pathways similar lifetimes but in actual fact it seems that they don't so m65 has had a pretty boring uneventful life Atlas M 66 has lived her that's right at least in its recent history M 65 has just been taking it easy M 66 has been pushed around a bit

Channel: DeepSkyVideos

Views: 71,255

Rating: 4.9623528 out of 5

Keywords: astronomy, astronomers, messier, space, galaxies, nebula, nebulae, stars, universe, deepsky, deepskyvideos, deep sky, telescope, Messier, Messier Objects, Messier Catalog, Messier Catalogue, Messier Object (Namesake), m65, spiral galaxy

Id: IJIwuFNNm3E

Length: 5min 11sec (311 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 05 2012