At 40,000,000 light years away, the Needle Galaxy (also known as Caldwell 38) is a spiral galaxy much like our own, viewed on edge. It's like if we were looking at our own Milky Way sky.....but from 40M light years away. This image was taken in Bortle 9 conditions in Redondo Beach,CA. In addition to the Needle Galaxy as the prime subject of this image, there are 4 additional fainter galaxies in the image - appearing as slight fuzz balls and fuzzy lines.

They call this time of year Galaxy season, because there are so many galaxies in the night sky that can be observed, and even more that can be imaged. There are so many wonderful things about imaging galaxies - their scale of what you are viewing is almost incomprehensible, the number of stars from which you are integrating the light to "see" a galaxy is in the billions, the time and distance that the light traveled to reach us on Earth is counted in geological Eras. While the nebula and star clusters that we image are practically neighbors to earth - a mere thousands of light years away for objects like the Horsehead Nebula or Orion Nebula - imaging a galaxy is a window into ancient history. If I want to travel back to the time of the dinosaurs, I can image M51 and surrounding galaxies; if I want to travel to the time that modern mammals (genetically and physiologically speaking) were emerging on Earth, and much of the earth looked more like the tropics....we can image the Needle Galaxy.

From a technical perspective, this image was supposed to be comprised of around 3X the imaging time I was able to capture (9-12 hours). In the couple of coastal California nights this spring that did not have fog, I was able to capture just over 3.5 hours of exposure. The second night was foiled by a strange phenomenon I have not been able to understand yet, where one of the neutral density filters used to attenuate the light panel used (after imaging) for flat field calibration had a huge shift in spectral behavior, with a spurious green transmission that completely screwed up the calibrated stacking process. By the time I was able to, by elimination, isolate it down to the flimsy polymer neutral density filter that has nothing to do with the telescope or imaging train....it was too late, and then came endless nights of fog. The final image is 101 images at 120s exposure, stacked with flat, bias, and dark calibration files, taken at F/6.3 (~1280mm Focal Length) using an 8" SCT with Off-axis guider, and Optolong L-Pro filter on an EQ6-R equatorial mount.

I look forward to revisiting this target next year with a boatload more exposure time - until next year, Needle.....