Pavo Galaxy

[andyc]

The Pavo Galaxy (NGC6744) is sometimes described as the galaxy most alike to our Milky Way. It lies about 30 million light-years away in Pavo, behind a carpet of foreground nearby stars. It's a fair bit bigger than the Milky Way at 175,000 light-years across compared to our 100,000, but has a pretty similar structure - many spiral arms and a central bar. We'd be about 2/3 of the way out towards the edge (an unregarded yellow sun in the unfashionable western spiral arm :) ). It's even got a disrupted satellite galaxy a little like our Large Magellanic Cloud - NGC6744A is a wisp of blue to the lower left.

Larger view here (http://www.pbase.com/andycasely/image/164055458)

Could do with a good bit more data, but this is 20 x 5 minutes (1hr 40min), and I don't know if I'll have time to get more. ISO800, EOS 60D, darks, flats and bias subtracted. 200mm f/5 Newtonian on HEQ5 pro mount, OAG & StarShoot Autoguider. Stacked and processed in PixInsight and Photoshop.

[RickS]

NGC6744 is a difficult target, Andy. That's a pretty amazing result for less than 2 hours!

Cheers,
Rick.

[Atmos]

I agree with Rick, for less than two hours it has come up quite nicely. I've only briefly attempted it myself, didn't realise just how dim it was!

[strongmanmike]

Not bad Andy, you have that fainter sweeping outer arm and like you say just needs more exposure, it has a low surfcae brightness this baby...are you imaging from Sydney? If so, probably benefit from grabbing more data from a dark site (if you are actually able to of course) :)

Mike

[Slawomir]

Nice result Andy :thumbsup:

I tried imaging this galaxy once and failed miserably...

[andyc]

Thanks Rick and Colin, it's one of those big dim ones, and I'm pretty happy to get this through the bit of LP we have here. I was pleasantly surprised to get the satellite galaxy, though without a lot more data to get the noise down, it's not an image that survives being enlarged too much!


Thanks Mike, yeah, I might try and grab a bit more before it sets this year. I have a chance to get south out of the Sydney lights at the long weekend (a place called Nerriga), I might think about a bit of imaging from there if I can, fingers crossed for clear skies! :campfire::astron: But I might be after new targets, will see...


Thanks Suavi :thumbsup: