PGC9408 and Friends (in Fornax)

[Atmos (Colin)]

Never heard of this galaxy? Not surprising, it may very well be the only amateur image of it in existence. Why? Well I just grabbed the telescope and moving it to some random unassuming patch of sky that would transit over zenith in a few hours. Was supposed to get twice the amount of data (2 hours of RGB per channel and the rest as Lum) but I ran into some camera driver issues, I have come to the conclusion that my QHY163 doesn't like Bootcamp on my MacBook Pro. Sometimes runs all night, sometimes not :/

Still fiddling with tilt but I'm slowly getting there. Think I've finally narrowed down to where the tilt is coming in so I'm going to do some packing of one corner tonight and then do some more fiddling this Friday night

Anyway, meet PGC9408 and a myriad of other galaxies. Apologies for the dark rings around some stars, star shapes aren't great and deconvolution doesn't like changing star shapes across the field

There appears to be some very faint IFN on the left side of the frame, 2 ADU above the background kind of faint. Considerably more Lum is needed and more than 30 minutes per channel of colour before it's worth even processing into the image.

High Res

[strongmanmike (Michael)]

..ok I give up...which on is PGC9408

I imagine it is the small fluffy galaxy lower left of centre?...looks like it has a polar ring, very cool

Mike

[Atmos (Colin)]

Originally Posted by strongmanmike

..ok I give up...which on is PGC9408

I imagine it is the small fluffy galaxy lower left of centre?...looks like it has a polar ring, very cool

Mike

Yeah that’s the one. It just happened to be almost centred out of pure irony.

[SimmoW (SIMON)]

Love it Colin, like an intrepid explorer looking for rare fauna. Maybe keep it on the same patch of sky and discover more faint ones!

[RickS (Rick)]

A new form of lucky imaging?

[Atmos (Colin)]

Originally Posted by SimmoW

Love it Colin, like an intrepid explorer looking for rare fauna. Maybe keep it on the same patch of sky and discover more faint ones!

I added another few hours (mostly RGB) on Friday night but it doesn’t seem to have made any real difference. Transparency wasn’t great and I ended up deleting a few hours of Lum that was cloud affected to some degree. Don’t think there is much more I can get out of this region without adding another 6 hours of Lum as I am curious as to whether there is some REALLY faint dust or if it is a flats issue. My brighter background is 123 ADU while the dimmer is 121-120 ADU.

Originally Posted by RickS

A new form of lucky imaging?

Hubble Deep Field kind of imaging but without Hubble or the depth haha

Out of curiosity I did some faint star searching in Maxim. Faintest star I could find had a Vmag of 22.1 with a SNR of 2.45 (so not overly accurate). The brightest was 10.188 with a SNR that the small window struggled to display.