Saint Richard's School, Bexhill

These images were taken by Yr 8 students of St Richard’s School, Bexhill, who are going to take GSCE Astronomy next year there.

Sky Object Name: M98
When taken: May 5, 2010 11:22:31 UTC
RA: 12h13'48"
DEC: 14°54'00"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 55 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Messier 98 (M98, NGC 4192) is one of the faintest objects in Messier's catalog. It is a beautiful spiral galaxy seen edge-on, and a member of the Virgo Cluster of Galaxies, situated in the southern part of constellation Coma Berenices.

Pinwheel Galaxy

Sky Object Name: M101

When taken: May 5, 2010 11:15:28 UTC
RA: 14h03'12"
DEC: 54°21'00"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 60 secs.
Instrument: EM01

Spiral galaxies, like M101, have well-defined spiral arms that wind around the galaxy within a rotating pancake-shaped disk of material. In this Hubble telescope “face-on” view of M101, bright blue areas of star formation pepper the spiral arms, which look like the arms of a pinwheel. Dark, thin dust lanes follow the spiral structure into a yellowish central bulge containing older stars.
In fact, M101’s disk is so thin that the Hubble telescope easily sees many more distant galaxies lying behind it. Seeing these background galaxies shows that a galaxy’s disk is really mostly empty space.

Sky Object Name: Black eye galaxy
When taken: May 5, 2010 11:08:04 UTC
RA: 12h56'44"
DEC: 21°40'58"
Filter: RGB
Exposure time: 60 secs.
Instrument: EM01

The Black Eye Galaxy (also called Sleeping Beauty Galaxy; designated Messier 64, M64, or NGC 4826) was discovered by Edward Pigott in March 1779, and independently by Johann Elert Bode in April of the same year, as well as by Charles Messier in 1780. It has a spectacular dark band of absorbing dust in front of the galaxy's bright nucleus, giving rise to its nicknames of the "Black Eye" or "Evil Eye" galaxy. M64 is well known among amateur astronomers because of its appearance in small telescopes. It is a spiral galaxy in the Coma Berenices constellation.