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Marcus Davies (marc4darkskies) | all galleries >> bellsobservatory >> photography >> Galaxies and Clusters > NGC 104 (47 Tucanae)
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25-SEP-2008 Marcus Davies

NGC 104 (47 Tucanae)

NGC 104 is a about 13,000 light years away in the constellation of Tucana. It's diameter is around 120 light years and it's dominated by old red giant stars.
Next to Omega Centauri (NGC 5139) 47 Tuc, as it's most commonly known, is the second largest and brightest globular cluster in the southern sky.
It's characterised by a very bright and dense core.

This is quite a deep, wide angle image. The small clusters on the left, right and bottom right are globulars associated with the Small Magellanic Cloud, the edge of which can be seen in the lower right corner of the image.

Unfortunately, the seeing on the night was poor - 3-4 arcsecs - so the stars are not quite as tight as they should be for an F5.5 image.

LRGB (60,45,45,45 mins) with 5 min subs. Total exposure time was 3.25 hours. The core region was supplemented with nine 1 minute subs to expose some detail.
TOA-150 @ F5.5 (FL 825mm with 645 Super Reducer) on a Takahashi EM-400 with SBIG STL 11000M camera. FOV 1.73 x 1.28 degrees @ 2.25 arcsec/pixel.

Imaging setup: http://www.pbase.com/gailmarc/image/92408151 full exif


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