I am a little late to the table with my rendition of this very picturesque pair of interacting galaxies for this season. This of course has provided me the opportunity to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' who have come before
A number of challenges were presented during image capture with some very pesky gradients which would appear to have resulted from a nearby mag 5 star plus some seriously ugly seeing. I finished junking all of the luminance subs but I don't think that the image suffered because of it.
Given the dynamic range difference from the core to the outer arms/antenna, it was always going to be a challenge trying to capture this in a 5" refractor with a 1.5 degree FOV. To help with alleviating this, a little over 60 subs per channel were captured at 10 minutes per exposure. This has helped with achieving a reasonable SNR.
Wow! You've done an astonishing job! The Astrobin version kept us amazed for ages. Sharp as a pin and very deep. The foreground stars sparkle like jewels. The background is very clean, but the faintest details are all there.
Wow! You've done an astonishing job! The Astrobin version kept us amazed for ages. Sharp as a pin and very deep. The foreground stars sparkle like jewels. The background is very clean, but the faintest details are all there.
Best,
MnT
Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterSEllis
Hi Rodney,
That is a lovely shot of NGC4038/4039, a nice one to add too your collection, it doesn't get much better than that.
Cheers
Peter
Thanks MnT, Peter. There was a lot of time spent on this one both in data collection and processing.
Winner - 2020 Capture the Cosmos - Open Deep Space section
I am most pleased that this image has won the Open Deep Space section of the 2020 "Capture the Cosmos - Under the Warrumbungle Sky" competition. We all put a lot of hard work and time into capturing and processing the data for our images so it is nice to win an award as well.
Nicely done Rodney...and congrats on the Coona win....was the image taken from Coona or Bathurst?
Either location would run rings around Southern Sydney...but last time I checked Mt Panorama was not under Coonabarabran skies...hence I figured the Astrobin location didn't make much sense.