Figure 1 – Messier 104 the Sombrero Nebula, Celestron Origin Image (c) DE Wolf 2025
Attempts to recollimate my Nexstar 8 SE have been a nightmare – more on that when the problem is solved. So, rather than wasting all the clear nights I decided last week to spend a beautiful clear-sky session with my Celestron Origin 8 SE. Even then, I ran into problems, due to clouds drifting into the field of view and crashing the acquisition. Nevertheless, Figure 1 is an approximately 20 min image of Messier 104, the Sombrero Galaxy – named, I think for obvious reasons.
Messier 104 is like a glowing hat floating in space. It’s located about 31 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Not that I ever took my own astrophotograph of it back then. But, it was certainly a time for youthful favorites and M104 was clearly one of these. and it’s one of those deep-sky objects that just sticks with you once you’ve seen it.
When viewed through a telescope, M104 looks like a broad, flat disk with a bright central bulge—and a dark dust lane cutting across it. That dust lane gives it the appearance of a Mexican sombrero, especially when viewed edge-on. Note the “boiling” of this edge. I think with a significantly longer exposure great detail can be obtained with the Origin and now that is one of my summer observing goals.
Even with a mid-sized telescope, you can catch that shape under decent sky conditions. It appears as a bright core with a dark line running through it—a visual treat that makes it a favorite among amateur astronomers.
Technically, it is an unbarred spiral galaxy (SA(s)a), about 50,000 light-years across. That is half the size of our Milky Way. It has an apparent magnitude a round 8.0, making it just beyond naked-eye visibility. It has a central black hole: Estimated at 1 billion solar masses! That’s enormous, even for a galaxy this size.
A great mystery centers around M104’s huge central bulge. What is causing this? The bulge is made up mostly of older, red stars — similar to what we see in elliptical galaxies. This suggests the bulge formed early in the galaxy’s history, possibly through rapid star formation or a series of mergers with smaller galaxies. These events would have funneled gas into the center, creating a dense, star-rich core.
As a result some astronomers believe M104 might be a hybrid between a spiral and an elliptical galaxy. Its large bulge hints at a past merger—perhaps it collided with or absorbed a smaller elliptical galaxy long ago. These kinds of interactions can puff up the central region and leave behind a thick, spherical structure.
M104 hosts a supermassive black hole that’s a billion times the mass of the Sun—one of the most massive known in a galaxy of this size. Its gravitational influence likely helped shape and maintain the dense bulge around it, pulling in stars and gas over time.
Additionally there is low star formation in the bulge. Unlike the disk (where you find spiral arms and lots of young, blue stars), the bulge is quieter. It’s dominated by older stars and has relatively little gas and dust, which means fewer new stars are forming. This makes the bulge appear more pronounced, especially when viewed edge-on like in M104.
It is the bulge, of course, that intrigues us most about Messier 104. Back in the day when I was newbie amateur astronomer, it was one of my favorite deep-sky objects. This was way before I ever saw it myself let alone photographed it. That was in the day of tedious star-hopping, no computers, and strictly unguided alt-azimuth mounts. It reminds me that about a month ago I watched a wonderful an ancient BBC production of the Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Newly aware of a world filled with people, Miranda says:
“Oh what a brave new world this is that has such people in it!”
It is, I think, a poetic irony that it is AI, a kind of non-being person that is leading us into such a brave new world. And again, we are led to Hamlet’s assertion that “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet must deal with ghost-like ethereal spectres, while Miranda’s ghosts are more corporeal.
I suppose that I really should end here with a quote from Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World.”
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
