Ngc 3621

[codemonkey]

A pretty challenging target, this one has some very faint arms. Over 9hrs of data was shot over the past few nights, with much of the luminance captured under a near-full moon which isn't terribly conductive to imaging faint stuff. I've also under-stated the processing somewhat, favouring smaller, better stars and core detail over bringing out all the faint stuff.

Seeing was reasonably good, average for the lum was just shy of 2.2"

Full res / captured details available on Astrobin here (http://www.astrobin.com/292258/?nc=user)

[topheart]

Hi Lee,
That's a very nicely done galaxy.
Cheers,
Tim

[alan meehan]

Nice capure LEE well worth the effort
ALAN

[Placidus]

Lee, that's exquisite. Beautifully captured and processed.

[RickS]

Nice detail and colour, Lee.

[alpal]

Hi Lee,
75 Luminance subframes - almost 1/9th of the noise!
Great work to capture that.
I am surprised that you got such a fantastic image from only a 120mm aperture.

cheers
Allan

[codemonkey]

Updated the OP with a reprocess. Did slightly better on the stars due to a new trick I just discovered, slightly less oversharpened, and a slightly tighter crop. Original version is still on Astrobin, as well as the new revision.



Thanks very much Tim, glad you like it :)



Thanks Alan, appreciate it!



Thanks very much Mike! It's a tough one, and while I haven't gone as deep as Ray and others have done, I'm still pretty happy with it.



Thanks Rick :-)



Thanks very much Allan :-) Small pixels combined with reasonable seeing let you do a reasonable job with a 120mm refractor. Never going to get the same resolution as a nice big scope though...

[strongmanmike]

Nice result Lee with good colour fidelity, yes the outer arms on this baby are rather faint.

Mike

[Regulus]

That's a nice result Lee. A very pleasant image. Detail and colour is satisfying. Well done.

Trevor

[codemonkey]

Thanks Mike; I found your version of this one -- you definitely managed a much better job in terms of bringing out those arms. Nice work mate.



Thanks Trevor :-)

[Shiraz]

this is a desperately tricky galaxy to image - nicely done Lee.

[Geoff45]

This is a hard one to process Lee. You've done well, but if you could bring out the faint outer arms a bit more it would really add to the image. Not easy. I gave up on this one a year or two ago.

[codemonkey]

Thanks Ray - it is a tricky one indeed.



Thanks Geoff :-) I've played around a bit but haven't been able to pull much more out of it without compromising other stuff. Not helping is the less than ideal conditions for much of the data and some bad flats that have left some patterns that become more obvious if I try and stretch it further.