Photo of the Week for January 5, 2018
When you see the words “Andromeda” and “galaxy” next to each other, you can’t help but think of the impressive object catalogued as M31. It is, after all, usually referred to as the Andromeda Galaxy. But M31 is not the galaxy of note in the constellation. Sitting nearly 20 degrees eastward is NGC891—an attractive, 10.1-magnitude edge-on system. Were it in any other constellation, NGC891 would likely be far better known. Even so, it’s a favourite target for deep-sky observers—especially those with mid-size and larger instruments, which are capable of revealing the galaxy’s distinctive dust lane.
The NGC891 portrait presented here was captured by Michel Arsenault from Tilbury, Ontario. He used a Celestron 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope (with a focal reducer, for an effective f-ratio of f/6.3) and an Altair Astro Hypercam 183C imaging camera to acquire the 300, 30-second sub-frames combined to produce the final image.
