NGC6744 The Great Pavo Spiral

[barx1963]

Latest attempt to get this slightly difficult target to play ball. This is a spectacular spiral with a bar, tight spiral arms displaying flocculent features, lots of ha regions and nice colour. Also has a companion (NGC6744A) which appears to have created a tidal tail which appears to the left side of the galaxy. The tail was the feature that was faintest and easily lost in my first processing attempts.
Details are: scope Celestron Edge 8" with 0.7 reducer, Moonlite Litecrawler focuser and ASI1600MM camera. Baader LRGB 36mm filters, EQ8 mount, ZWO OAG and 290MM guide camera. PHD2 and SGP for capture. Pixinsight processing.
All 300 secod exposures over 4 night. 30 of L, 20 each of Red and Green and 18 of Blue. Total of 7.33 hours

Malcolm

[Startrek]

Malcolm,
That’s a great image of Pavo picking up the faint outer spirals as well
Nice colours and good resolution
The dense Star field around this Galaxy tends to reduce contrast a bit but you certainly have made this one “pop out”
It’s well placed early evening at the moment to capture a good 4 or 5 hours on it before it passes the meridian
One of my favourites
Well done !!
Martin

[PKay]

Look after your data Malcolm.

Each year add another 7 hours.

Perhaps some O3, Ha, who knows...

Show us what is out there :)

[barx1963]

Thanks Martin.
The outer spiral arms were my main objective. The stars were quite easily dealt with using the EZ Star Reduction script in Pixinsight. Works a treat!

Malcolm

[barx1963]

Thanks Pete
Hoping to get some Ha on this one soon. Should be lots there. Question willbe processing it into this image!

Malcolm

[Geoff45]

Good capture of the faint details Malcolm. Overall a very pleasing image of this nice galaxy. Good colours and good detail.
Geoff

[barx1963]

Thanks Geoff, really appreciate it.

Malcolm

[gregbradley]

Nice image of this one Malcolm.

It actually is rather a hard galaxy to capture. It rather faint and it has a lot of MWay stars in front of it that crowd it.

Its amazing how many spiral galaxies have a small companion galaxy that distort the main spiral.

Greg.

[AdamJL]

Wow! Amazing image. Definitely something to aspire to. Great work

[barx1963]

Thanks Greg
The foreground stars were a problem. The whole project was imaged over 5 nights ad 4 processing sessions so glad I ended up with a result.

Malcolm

[Ryderscope]

You’ve done a great job Malcolm on an object that is surprisingly difficult to process.