This image was collected over three nights (with the usual beer through the night and Maca's on the way home ) and is a deep rendition of the interacting galaxies in Fornax, NGC 1316/1317.
I framed it to take in the usually overlooked, looping tidal tail/extension, to the lower left of the galaxy in this image, make sure you have calibrated your monitor in order to clearly see this faint feature .
Stretching and enhancing the 10hrs of Luminance data (12 inch aperture at F3.8) reveals that when the faint extensions and halo are factored in, this tumultuous galaxy tango field is quite enormous on the sky, covering slightly more sky area than the full moon!! and it barely all fits in my 38' X 30' FOV!
Cool to note too, that the only bit of recent star formation that has occurred, in either galaxy, is the ring of blue stars encircling the inner regions there in NGC 1317, the rest of the scene looks to be made of rather ancient stars..?
NGC 1316/1317 (click on image and pan around with your cursor)
Enhanced Luminance (to better reveal the very faint tidal tail, various extensions and the massive galaxy halo)
To go galaxy hunting HERE is the Full Res Full Size version.
A close up look at the complex array of dust lanes, within the inner 2' X 2' core region, is attached to the post and also HERE
HERE is a comparison with the ESO 2.2m telescope at La Silla
EDIT: How faint can we go?...
Scotty Alder (Tornado33) made an interesting comment regarding this image on Facebook, that gotta me to a thanking....hmmm?
Scott commented that he would like to see me push my big fast scope to see how deep it can go, hey a bloody great idea ...but then I thought, hmm? I took 10hrs with a 300mm dia scope at a fast F3.8 under reasonably dark skies, so I wonder just how deep I had already managed to go..?
So I searched for deep images or even better, quantitative empirical papers on the brightness of some of the faint outer tidal tail regions of NGC 1316. Well low and behold it didn't take long and I found one
A paper by E. Iodice et al from 2017 shed some very interesting light on my enquiry. This paper used deep imaging data from the ESO VLT Survey Telescope (VST) a 2.6m F5.5 modified Ritchey-Chretien optical layout with a two lens wide-field corrector and located at Cerro Paranal in Chile.
In fact this paper revealed that some of the very faintest structures captured in my data were only identified as recently as 2017 and reported in this paper, the faintest of which (labelled L9 in the annotated image at the link below) shine at an almost impossibly feeble 30.1 mag/squ arc sec!! (which is about 2000X fainter than the core region of the galaxy!)...but never the less, still detectable with amateur equipment
So the initial answer to Scotty's question is..well? in 10hrs worth of 10min exposures through my 12" F3.8 Newt, using a modern commercial cooled CCD camera (SXVR-H694) I can (at least) record faint structures with surface brightness's fainter than 30mag/square arc sec!...that's BLOOD FAINT...in this case, so faint in fact, that even for a significant and regularly studied galaxy like NGC 1316, they weren't identified until just 3 years ago!
Thanks for sharing Mike, I'm set up at our local club site right now, and the Fornax galaxies are on my list tonight.
Cool I looked it this galaxy while I was imaging it, using my 12" visual dob under reasonable (Bortle 4) skies, it was two fuzzy blobs side by side, one larger than the other ....love to look at it through say a 24-30" Dob (like Allan Wades) under Bortle 1 skies though....
Great image Mike. There's lot's of good things about this hobby of ours, both scientific (which is what attracts me) and artistic. This image is a great example of the artistic while preserving and show casing the science in the hobby.
Great image Mike. There's lot's of good things about this hobby of ours, both scientific (which is what attracts me) and artistic. This image is a great example of the artistic while preserving and show casing the science in the hobby.
Kevin
Cheers Kevin, it's always cool to check your pretty picture data, for cool things within and appreciate the object and all the interesting things captured in a FOV. It can be easy to find ourselves focused on trivial processing perfection and completely forget what it is that we are actually doing ...ie. imaging cool stuff
Quote:
Originally Posted by alpal
Great image Mike,
I didn't realise that target was so large in a frame.
Thanks for posting that.
cheers
Allan
Yeah it's huuuuge!
Quote:
Originally Posted by marc4darkskies
Very interesting image Mike! Nicely done!
The faint foreground stars seem a little thin on the ground though. I'd have thought with 10 hours of Lum they'd be more obvios??
Thanks Marcus
Interesting observation mate...hey? perhaps, dunno?...but to be honest, not a biggy for me in the scheme of things ....plenty of other cool stuff in the image I could probably enhance the fainty wainty stars back in a tad but de-emphasising the stars does help showcase the galaxy detail ...think star removal and Topaz AI
Your comment got me curious though ...HERE is a full res 1:1 comparison with 2.2m ESO data...if you look very closely, with a nice bright monitor, the missing stars are only the very tiniest faintest ones here and there but most can be faintly seen in both shots...apart form the missing fainty waity stars, I recon the overall galaxy detail, otherwise holds up very nicely to the muuuuch bigger aperture in better seeing , so meah, I'm happy enough
In the end, the reality is, limiting magnitude is essentially a function of aperture...and of course seeing (wobbly atmosphere scrubs out the faintest stars), so, unless you hammer mega data (ala Rolf Olsen ) a 0.3m aperture has a hard time matching a 2.2m, at least as far as reaching faint stars goes...but!...detail in extended features is a different story
Mike
Last edited by strongmanmike; 15-11-2020 at 06:01 PM.
Unreal, Mike A very, very interesting one to look long and hard at
To anyone thinking that the thumbnail attached is the main show, I suggest taking the time to load up one of the links!
The comparison with ESO is testament to your talent, effort, experience, etc. What a gun!
Thanks JP ...yes, like actually reading the post ... I am sure there are many who canni be bothered clicking on the links either ...oh well, never mind, their loss
Thanks Andy ....woooonder....what.... yoooou ...collected under dark skies... aaaaah?
Mike
Lol 😂 nothing! Spent the night with my mate Paul programming & calibrating all my gear to work & play nice with SGP - Automation at last! Started an image run at 2:00am but clouds rolled in an hour later. Didn’t matter though, as everything is now working and I can potentially image platesolve & flip, while sleeping - worth burning a night in the country to get that done! 🙂
Lol �� nothing! Spent the night with my mate Paul programming & calibrating all my gear to work & play nice with SGP - Automation at last! Started an image run at 2:00am but clouds rolled in an hour later. Didn’t matter though, as everything is now working and I can potentially image platesolve & flip, while sleeping - worth burning a night in the country to get that done! ��
Ok but..? was any beer or wine had through all that?
Interesting observation mate...hey? perhaps, dunno?...but to be honest, not a biggy for me in the scheme of things ....plenty of other cool stuff in the image I could probably enhance the fainty wainty stars back in a tad but de-emphasising the stars does help showcase the galaxy detail ...think star removal and Topaz AI
Mike
Nah, forget AI - it's just a buzzword for automating somebody else's heuristic logic. Use your own RI (Real Intelligence) - much better results.
Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
Your comment got me curious though ...HERE is a full res 1:1 comparison with 2.2m ESO data...if you look very closely, with a nice bright monitor, the missing stars are only the very tiniest faintest ones here and there but most can be faintly seen in both shots...apart form the missing fainty waity stars, ...
Cool!
"Fainty wainty" eh?! Is that a new advanced astro-processing term?
Quote:
Originally Posted by strongmanmike
In the end, the reality is, limiting magnitude is essentially a function of aperture...and of course seeing (wobbly atmosphere scrubs out the faintest stars), ...
Mike
You mean like the wobbly atmosphere last night that scrubbed ALL my fainty wainty stars?
Only just saw this one. Wow, what a stunner. Such amazing resolution. Look at that blue ring around the core of the smaller galaxy. Is that all new star formation going on?
) and is a deep rendition of the interacting galaxies in Fornax, NGC 1316/1317.
.
and it barely all fits in my 38' X 30' FOV!
....love to look at it through say a 24-30" Dob (like 
...ie. imaging cool stuff 
) a 0.3m aperture has a hard time matching a 2.2m, at least as far as reaching faint stars goes...but!...detail in extended features is a different story 
... I am sure there are many who canni be bothered clicking on the links either 
...oh well, never mind, their loss 
