Pavo Spiraller

[Addos]

Pavo spirae ad max :)

A quick two night integration on this spiral galaxy in the southern constellation Pavo. Known as NGC 6744 or C101, its speculated to look quite similar to our Milky Way. She's got some very interesting colours and worthy of an attempt!

This sits sadly right near the Brisbane CBD light cone from the backyard so gradients are pretty strong with this one; pushing for more integration time would really suffer from diminishing returns. That said, it caused me to try Graxpert for the first time and I can attest, its light years ahead of DBE. Absolutely magical piece of software, highly recommend. It may have been nice to get some Ha signal, but I was pleasantly surprised with how well the star forming regions came through.

On the second night we seemed to have some really exceptional seeing, even through the light pollution. The old eq6 was giving me ~0.4" rms, very impressed, enough for me to hit pause on staring at the NYX-101 :P

7 hrs luminance and 3.5hrs each RGB for close to 18hrs all up. Long winter nights be good for something :)

Non 200kb atrocity here: https://www.astrobin.com/khxyim/

[TR]

That nice Adam. It's a difficult galaxy to get correct. The low surface brightness makes this guy a little more challenging. :thumbsup:

[alpal]

Great result Adam,
that was the one I suggested for Mike:
https://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=206257&page=2

NGC 6744 - it's a beautiful spiral galaxy and up high in July.
You've even captured the colours so
from the the Brisbane CBD light cone that's exceptional.

cheers
Allan

[petershah]

beautiful natural looking process

[Dave882]

Gosh that’s good. How on earth you get such colour and detail with your 120 is beyond me but hats off that’s great!

[strongmanmike]

An excellent NGC 6744 Adam, with lovely colour (often missing from images of this galaxy), especially as you say, the HII flecks show up nicely and considering your light polluted location, its a fantastic result. I think if you were to re shoot from a darker sky you might get a more "meaty" result and gradients would be much less of an issue but well done :thumbsup:

I love it when the seeing and guiding drop to low levels, I could watch the merely quivering guide star centroid plot, for hours! ...it's a fetish :P

Mike

[Addos]

Many thanks guys :)
Thanks for noticing the colour balance, that one was the focus here when I realised detail would be lacking.
A couple of nice images on Astrobin from people using El Sauce data helped me dial in my use of SPCC made immeasurably easier after graxpert had done its thing.
It does seem really sensitive to where and how big your background reference preview is, so a bit of playing around with that was all I really did to balance it. I also took a leaf out of Andy Campbell's book and stopped being bashful with the C and S curve sliders on my stars, and happy I went that way :P

[TrevorW]

Very well done IMO :)