Although it is one of the brightest galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, Messier 58 was described by Charles Messier as an extremely faint galaxy that disappeared when he applied the small amount of light needed to illuminate the crosshairs of his telescope. It's small angular diameter makes it a difficult object in the RASA 8, and it is hard to pull much detail out of the galaxy under the CSOs Bortle 8/9 skies. This image is taken from data captured over several nights. The galaxy is visible for a short time in the strip of sky between trees and a house roof. Taken with the RASA 8 and DS10C with L-Pro filter, this image represents 102 minutes of total integration time. The image is cropped from my earlier post on integration times and has been further processed than the image in that post. M58 is an intermediate, barred spiral and was, in Messier's time, the farthest known astronomical object (although it was not recognized as such).
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