NGC 7424 in Grus

[strongmanmike]

Often overlooked by imagers, for the nearby and more famous Grus Trio, NGC 7424 is a lovely face on spiral galaxy about 37 million light years away.

This was another single night image, facilitated by a lovely clear Moonless night on Thursday, with over 7hrs of useable data collected during less than 8.5hrs of darkness, to make a full LHaRGB image...close to a record for me..?

While not the best Eagleview turns on, the seeing largely cooperated to an acceptable level across the night, sitting mostly around a FWHM of 2" but a number of subs dipped down to 1.8" for a period around midnight.

All capture details can be found with the image:

Astro Bin (https://www.astrobin.com/gkrajt/0/)

PBase (https://pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/174933560/original)

This is the last image to be taken with the SX Trius 694 Pro Blue edition before upgrading to the new arrival of its finer pixeled brethren, the 814 Pro :) This will improve my image scale by 20% to take better advantage of the nights of good seeing at Eagleview, illustrated pretty well in this comparison (https://pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/174933829/original) with my result from my previous observatory with all the same equipment and processing software. The increased sampling should also help in deconvolution, so here's hoping :prey: :thumbsup:

Hope you enjoy

Mike

[rmuhlack]

Got to be happy with that for a single night's worth of imaging. The Ha regions really pop too. I'm sure Kevin would give it the thumbs up :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Cheers Richard. Always seems to be tough to get in as much sky time as one would like, so yeah, a reasonably decent, five filter image, in a single night, is always satisfying :)

Mike

[Startrek]

Nice image and great work to capture the whole set in only 7 hours
Us folk under heavy LP ( at least 8 months of the year ) can only drool at capturing a whole set in such a short stint and still produce a cracking good galaxy image , a dim one at that.

Well done indeed !!

Martone

PS: just noticed a larger star peeping its halo at the top of the frame.

[strongmanmike]

Cheers Andy :D

Although I dealt with some intermittent high cloud, which is hard to keep a track on visually because you just can't see it under dark sky conditions, I was lucky enough to have acceptable or better, seeing the whole night, even when lower down. With an object like this that passes through the zenith, I usually start when the object is around 30deg elevation, hit RGBHaLum in that order, then meridian flip and manually reacquire and frame the target and hit LumHaBGR, in that order, down into the west. Thursday night went like clockwork, with only one or two subs rejected :)

Yes that star looks cool, like a light from heaven shining down on the galaxy :)

Mike

[CoolhandJo]

There is some rich colour in that galaxy. Benefits of your locaiton and sky

[Derek Klepp]

Nice Mike and good to see the comparison.Nothing like some new toys to improve the view.
Cheers Derek

[strongmanmike]

And my saturation slider :P :lol:



That's the thing Derek, the two images in the comparison were made with all the same equipment and software, only the site had changed :)

But yes, the new camera should improve things a little further :prey:

Mike

[alpal]

Nicely done Mike,
it's a difficult dim target.

I think would have stretched it a teeny weeny little bit more.


cheers
Allan

[Bart]

Lovely strong colours, Mike. Another gorgeous galaxy.:)

Good luck with the new camera, I hope you enjoy using it.:thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

He he yeah, maybe, and I know you have seen it already but for the benifit of others, the mega stretched (https://pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/174938308/original) version shows nuthin worth revealing :shrug:



Cheers Graham, the 20% smaller and more numerous pixels, should make a difference, at least on those semi regular nights when the seeing is good (https://pbase.com/strongmanmike2002/image/174013583/original) :prey:

Mike

[alpal]

Hi Mike,
your images are very honest -
you don't add to what is there -
you seem to make only global adjustments.
I'm just saying that maybe with a little more stretching
those galaxy arms would have popped more.
That's your choice so I'm not criticising you.
people like Ken Crawford have a different take on processing
http://www.imagingdeepsky.com/Tutorials/MSDLB_Stream/MSDLB_Stream.html

and will step in with local enhancements which could
be described as cheating by purists such as yourself.

cheers
Allan

[Ryderscope]

Nice! We do love a good galaxy :)

Now if you get on to this quick enough you might be able to image it again with the new camera and we could do a like for like comparison :D

[strongmanmike]

Look I agree, global adjustments are more genuine and prevent creating a feature or features when there really isn't much of one there, or worse, one at all and then defining it incorrectly especially regarding shape and extent, Lasso may not be your friend in this case, or reveal using the eraser in PS, so beware. Having said that, in the end, few of us are in this deep sky imaging for truly accurate science and many are strongly influenced by the arty side of what we do and that's ok too, there are no laws. Look at all the completely unrealistic astro skyscape type images that place the full 180deg arc of the Milky Way, in the sky behind a maybe 90deg wide scene of a church, or narrow 30deg wide view of rocks, this is just not a real scene but damn, it looks bluudy good! :)



Cheers mate and yes maybe I will, we will see....gota get up there and do the switch and have a play :)

Mike

[alpal]

Fair enough Mike,
By the way -
that link I gave to the Digging Out the Details
by Ken Crawford no longer works as it's the old Flash Player format
which is not available.
Back in 2011 I saved the 8 videos from there so I can still see them
all in MP4 format.
Ken hasn't republished them in a usable way even here:
http://www.imagingdeepsky.com/Presentations.html

As you know - these days some people are using BlurXTerminator and other more modern tricks.
In my humble opinion -
Ken's ideas are still valid - such as going to high signal to noise ratio
areas like the center of galaxies and sharpening more there
than other low signal areas - with carefully designed masks to exclude the stars - and adjusting the contrast too.

cheers
Allan

[Dave882]

Lovely work Mike. Some really tantalising detail in both the core and outer arms. Gosh I wish I had your sky…

[strongmanmike]

:scared3:...I know! :scared::scared::scared: :lol:



Cheers Dave, it was yet another one of my semi regular, impatient, self satisfying, I want a complete image and I want it NOW, one night stands..arhem, a quicky so to speak :D...I really need a 1m class scope so I can go deep with much shorter exposures, would make multi object per night imaging a breeze, ala W. Promper :confuse3: :thumbsup:

Mike