It is with a heavy heart that I post this, my latest image from Eagleivew Observatory and the first I have managed since the loss of our beloved son Ben on 12 Dec 2023.
As you might imagine things have been tough for us since and I hadn't felt like imaging, just not the head space for it... but this last New Moon, I finally got the urge. We have been planning Bens ashes spreading ceremony in recent weeks (an emotional roller coaster), which will take place on the 23rd of March on top of Mt Eagle in the Tinderry's, so I really wanted to do an image in honour of Ben and dedicate it to him, why?..it just feels good to do so, death and returning to the Universe, just seems a pretty real thing.
I chose a galaxy because I love imaging them, I wanted something not imaged very often, something far away, something in an interesting field, hopefully with some dust or emission gas in it and I wanted stars in it too, bright colourful stars. I was looking for something that evoked a ferry, carrying Bens soul, dodging the stars, to the other side, just like in the song....
So, IC2531 in Antlia just jumped out at me, had all the right ingredients
My wife absolutely loves the final result, so now each attendee next weekend will receive a colour A5 photographic print of it, with some nice words written on the back, something special that they might be likely to keep and I guess unique for most, I am sure
Anyway that's enough of the sad stuff....
I was blessed with 3 great nights, dark and transparent, mild and calm, with seeing FWHM (as measured in MaximDL) of between 1.6" and 2.1" and mostly around the 1.8" mark, which is pretty respectable and handy if you are imaging a small galaxy, so...very happy. I didn't use a Ha filter but in order to get the faint veil of emission nebula, I used all the Lum subs for the master luminance (just under 13hrs), applying DDP and unsharpmasking to the master luminance. Then, in order to reveal and highlight the thin but detailed dust lane that gives this galaxy a similar appearence to our own Milky Way, I median combined just the best sub frames with ave FWHM = 1.8" or less (about 8hrs worth) and applied traditional Richardson-Lucy deconvolution in Astroart (100 iterations) with an extra touch of sharpening in photoshop and layered it into the master Luminance. The red emission was pretty faint but it came out ok in the end, even without using an Ha filter.
Hope you like it.
IC2531 in Antlia - Ben's Galaxy (Click on image or finger enlarge on your phone)
Full Frame image (use screen sliders or your fingers to enlarge) or
HERE
A distant Milky Way (130 million light years)
RIP Ben
she's a whopper! 
