I thought that I would take a break today from photographs from my Florida trip and post the image of Figure 1, which I took on one of the Skygems Observatories robotic or remote telescopes. This was taken on a twenty inch telescope in Namibia. It is 31.1 million light years away and has a a diameter of approximately 49,000 light-years.

M104 resembles a Mexican sombrero and for that reason as well as its head on orientation is truly one of the most dramatic and appealing of the Messier objects! In the 1990s, a research group led by John Kormendy demonstrated that the Sombrero Galaxy contains a supermassive black hole, with a mass of ~ a billion times that of the sun.