Five years ago, I received a wonderful gift of an astronomy atlas namely “Cosmos: A Field Guide” from a medical student now in residency training in Miami. On the cover of that book is an awesome image of the Sombrero Galaxy (M104) taken with the Hubble Space Telescope – HST (see attached “Brett&CosmosBook.jpg”). But it wasn’t until this May 2016, when it was almost too late to capture, that I imaged this galaxy in an attempt to reproduce the HST image with my Chiefland RCOS telescope. The Sombrero was already well past the meridian sinking fast into the west (see “MaySky.jpg”) with most data recorded in 2-3 atmospheres with interference from lightning in nearby thunderstorms. Barry Riu visited my observatory on one of those nights I was capturing data during an astro-expedition to CAV in early May. I brought up a 20-minute luminance Sombrero subframe on my computer screen and executed a quickie DDP using CCDOPS and behold, the bright central hub was tamed! Barry then suggested that I process the final image to accentuate dust lanes in the back of the galaxy usually hidden by the bright hub. So that was my goal in this attempt. “Sombrero.jpg” has the hub suppressed so that the posterior dust lanes are visible. A mouseover on my website (link below) shows two contrasting processing efforts, one preserving the hub and the other suppressing it. And the same data yields 17.5 mag. ultra-compact dwarf galaxy SUCD1 (link below) as well as a very elusive tidal stream (see “M104TidalStream.jpg”).
The month of September on a 2016 Hubble astronomy calendar I have shows an incredible image of the Sombrero which is the combo of HST visible (RGB) and Spitzer (infrared) data (see last link below). I figured if Hubble could marry up with Spitzer data, why not me? So I mated my 12 hour LRGB RCOS Sombrero data with Spitzer data and the offspring is seen in “Infrared&CAVLRGB.jpg”. I think this combo image best shows the details of the Sombrero disc that Barry was dreaming of. I believe those faint fuzzies around the Sombrero are distant galaxies rather than globular clusters. The steady and dark skies of Chiefland allowed capture of fine details as well as a faint tidal star stream.
P.S. – Sombrero LRGB data: Lum 6 hours 1×1 deconvolved in CCDStack; RGB 6 hours 2×2
http://www.williamsseaandsky.com/?page_id=6272 — Sombrero Galaxy mouseover
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150726.html – Famous Hubble M104 masterpiece!!!
http://www.pbase.com/image/126173938 – “Strongman” violates M104 loop from Down Under!
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.2905.pdf – Incredible article (pdf) about tidal streams!! See Page 4 Figure 4 for M104 loop!!!
http://mnrasl.oxfordjournals.org/content/394/1/L97.full.pdf – Sombrero Ultra-Compact Dwarf (SUCD1)!!!!
http://www.eso.org/public/images/sombrero/ — ESO Sombrero
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA07899 — Spitzer infrared image!!! See Figure 1 for HST/Spitzer combo