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| M104 |
M104
Sombrero Galaxy
| Object | M104 - Galaxy |
| Constellation | Virgo |
| Date Aquired | 04/28/2003 |
| Camera | ST-2000XM with CFW-8 and AO-7 |
| Exposure | 19X5 Min L, 5X10 Min R (2x2) , 5X5 Min G (2x2), 5X8 min B (2x2) |
| Telescope | Celestron C11 |
| Mount | Losmandy G11 |
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The Sombrero a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way that we see nearly
edge on, and the rim of the Sombrero is made up of a dust band around the
edge of the galaxy. The bulge at the nucleus of the galaxy is several
billion times the size of the of the Milky Way's.
Aside from being the most Mexican of galaxies, M104's claim to fame
is to be the first galaxy to be recognized for what it really was; an
island of stars just like our own Milky Way galaxy. I always find it
amazing that as recent as the time when my Grandfathers were babies, and
Einstein was doing his famous work on relativity, we really didn't know
that the universe was made up of millions of galaxies, each with billions
of stars. It was thought that all the stars in the universe were the ones
in the Milky Way, and that Galaxies were just some sort of nebula. In
1912, Vesto Silpher found that M104 was moving too fast to be inside our
Galaxy, and in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble (the guy who the space telescope is
named after), used this data to develop our modern understanding of the
expanding universe started by the Big Bang.
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