Observations of M32
These are the observations available for M32. If you have any of your own that you'd like to submit we'd love to put them on the website.
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Messier 32 and surroundings
M 32 is a small but bright dwarf galaxy close to M 31. Usually, people taking images of M 31 don’t concern themselves with M 32 and fix their exposures to see most of the fainter detail in M 31. Consequently, M 32 usually comes out as a small, bright blob. I've attached my full-frame image of M 32, correctly exposed to capture it at the expense of a much fainter M 31 behind.
This image of Messier 32 and its surroundings is by David Davies and taken from Cambridge in the UK. To see more of David's work please visit his Flickr Photostream. M 32 is something of an enigma. It appears to be a relatively rare compact elliptical galaxy, 6,500 light-years across, with a very high density of stars at its core and a supermassive black hole of more than half the mass of our Sagittarius A*. It contains older faint, red and yellow stars usually found in the core of a large spiral galaxy. One hypothesis, therefore, is that M 32 might be the remnant of a former spiral galaxy that lost its outer spiral arms in a previous encounter with M 31 about two billion years ago. If so, then what we see today is the remaining dense core of what was a much bigger galaxy.
A close-up crop of Messier 32 by David Davies. I've enjoyed inspecting the full frame image, especially the large star-forming region in M31, NGC 206 to the right of the frame. I've also searched for some of the many globular clusters in M31. The image below is a labelled crop from the main image showing four such clusters, including G76, one of the largest globular clusters visible to us in M31.
A labelled image of the larger Globular clusters in Messier 31 by David Davies. Image Details
Data: 40 x 180s RGB images.
- Telescope: 250mm Ritchey-Chretien
- Camera: ZWO ASI071MC
- Mount: Skywatcher EQ8.
- Software: NINA, Astro Pixel Processor, Pixinsight, Spectrophotometric Colour Calibration, BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator, Photoshop
David Davies - (31 October 2023).
