Starship Asterisk*

nehushtan wrote:TMBG, famous for science in their music, has an oblique song which I believe is about this galaxy:

rstevenson wrote:

owlice wrote:Rob, thanks for your image! Is it available in a larger size? If so, I'd like to see it. The Sombrero Galaxy usually looks more like a ring galaxy than a spiral to me; your reprocessing makes it look more like a spiral to me.

Here's a much larger one.

M104-ext-lg.jpg

This time I watched while I did the deed, and it's clear I'm losing a lot of the outer-most ring -- all of the darkest outer ring just disappears. That's because I'm dragging the brightness slider down to -100 (on a scale of 0 to 100) and the contrast slider to +50. Extreme, as I said. But it seems the only way to make those inner dust lanes come clear, at least it is if I start with the Hubble image as published. I suppose I might get better results if I worked on the original single-filter-at-a-time files, but I have no knowledge of how to do that or even where I might find the files to work with. Also, of course, different filters used to image the galaxy might be much better at revealing the dust while not being washed out by the glare of that central bulge.

Rob

rstevenson wrote:

• The faint inner dust lanes may be tilted somewhat in relation to the overall plane of the galaxy, since the "top" of the galaxy appears to be dished somewhat yet the faint inner dust lanes can be easily seen below the near edge of the main dust ring. It looks to me as if those inner dust lanes are low in the near-left quandrant while being higher in the far-right quadrant.

Ann wrote:

Dustin wrote:Thanks for today's image.
The vast symmetry of that galaxy makes my jaw drop.

The extreme symmetry of M104 is in itself proof that this galaxy is "quiet" as far as star formation goes.

Take a look at this SDSS image of basically "red and dead" galaxy NGC 4314 by David Hogg:
...
This regrettably small image shows you an almost all-yellow galaxy with a perfectly straight yellow bar, an oval bulge, a well-formed ring surrounding the bulge and two symmetrical spiral arms. Everything is perfectly symmetrical, and there is no trace of star formation anywhere in this galaxy except in a small ring around the nucleus.

Compare the symmetry of basically all "red and dead" NGC 4314 with the lack of symmetry in massively starforming large spiral galaxies M61, M99 and M101:
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In M104, by contrast, there is very little star formation, which is why the galaxy is so symmetrical. Even the dust lane is "quiet". In another edge-on galaxy with a lot more star formation, the dust lane is bubbling with "fountains", which are likely the remnants of supernovae or very strong stellar winds from young stellar clusters:
Ann