The exquisitely beautiful face-on spiral IC 5332 in Sculptor is ridiculously faint. The surface magnitude is about 23.7 per square arcsec, which is about two magnitudes fainter than a good dark sky. We were impressed by Joe Cauchi's image of this galaxy, and all the way up to astonished by Martin Pugh's. Few others have been brave enough to try it. Wikipedia mentions that there is not much star formation going on here. The galaxy should therefore not be so especially colourful, but instead should be rather subdued.
Big image here
Seeing was pretty ordinary going on terrible, and we don't have adaptive optics, so we don't come anywhere near Martin's rendition for detail, but we think the depth is there, and we've tried to be neutral to careful with the colour, rather than showing it as bright blue when it isn't.
Note the most unusual-looking galaxy toward top left of the big one. It seems to have a hole punched in it, reminiscent of NGC 247.
So far we have 12hrs 30 mins of luminance in 30 min subs, plus a total of 6 hours of RGB. Expecting a week of rain over new moon
so this will do for now.
FLI PL16803 camera on 20 inch PlaneWave CDK. All control electronics, firmware, acquisition and processing software built or written by us in-house. That it works at all is a miracle.