It is often said that perspective matters.  For a select few galaxies that are oriented nearly edge-on from our vantage point, that perspective renders a truly spectacular view.  The Needle Galaxy is one such galaxy, and thus was granted "first light" status as a target for my EdgeHD 14 in Southern California.

This was a difficult journey:

After waiting nearly a year and a half, I finally got my hands on an EdgeHD 14 even though Celestron had estimated 2024.  Unfortunately it was beat to Hell in transit, but I was lucky that B&H Photo had more than one on hand (huge kudos to B&H for their absolutely first-rate customer support).  The scope went right up on the mount (an iOptron CEM120EC2) using the full-frame imaging train from the EdgeHD 9.25 it replaced.

My excitement was short-lived.  While the image train is identical between the EdgeHHD 9.25, 11 and 14 (same 2" baffle tube and 146.05mm backfocus), I had big problems.  There was a strange "blooming" in the center of the field, strong vignetting in the corners and a very strange optical artifact that looked like a partial offset shadow of the OAG prism -- only in the red filter.  I spent countless hours disassembling, tweaking and re-assembling things to little avail.  

Eventually I put some adhesive "drawer liner" in the shiny anodized interior of the Esatto focuser.   That resolved most of the problems, but I also discovered I needed drawer liner in the end of the EdgeHD 14.  My theory is the threaded retaining ring used to hold the visual back in place was transmitting incident light that was reflecting off other things in the image train, particularly in the red spectrum, and causing the strange offset shadow I saw.  It didn't seem particularly reflective, but it did have a few small machining nicks on it and the glue used to prevent rotation was a little shiny.  Once I carefully addressed that issue, my problems went away and I experienced the best images I've ever had from an EdgeHD.

Overall, I am thrilled at how well this equipment now runs.  I have the fortune of being able to operate from skies with generally decent seeing (often 2" and sometimes better), but I was very concerned that this long focal length and large aperture would sharply curtail the number of nights I could image.  I am happy to report that this does not seem to be the case, though that isn't to say there aren't challenges.  Finding guide stars is a serious problem (I'm contemplating an ONAG), and in long-duration photos you can actually see the star cores as they bounce around.  In this photo, a few of the brighter stars have artifacts around them from photons captured as they scintillated.

About NGC 4565:

About 31 million light years distant and about 100,000 light years in diameter, The Needle is a spiral-type Hubble "Sb" galaxy with a tightly wound core and prominent central bulge.  The galaxy has an active galactic nucleus, which means it is brighter than can be explained by the star population alone.  In this case, NGC 4565 is believed to have a supermassive black hole at its center which causes hot gas to glow brightly as it falls towards the center.  In the outer parts of the galaxy, numerous hot-blue star-forming regions can be seen.  One of the most prominent and famous parts of this galaxy is the dark dust lane that runs along the disk.