NGC 55, A Sculptor Galaxy

[Zuts]

Hi Guys

This is taken from 100 km out of Sydney, so darker skies :)

It was my last image of the night and I think the mount had settled into the dirt a bit and so the tracking wasnt as good resulting in eggy stars. Slightly cropped.

6 by 600 sec subs, darks plus flats, UV/IR block
TV85, TV 0.8 reducer on EQ6, self guided with SBIG 2000 XCM
Levels and Curves PS2, Sum combine in Maxim, Neat Image
Reduced to 1200 pixels, 60 % compression.

Thanks for looking, any comments appreciated.

[Gama]

Is it tracking ?, as if you look at the direction of both top left and top right side stars, they point/trail to a common centre, so i would say you have field distortion rather than tracking. Maybe play with the reducer and spacing.
Apart from that, you got some good detail from a hard object.

Theo

[Garyh]

Came up very nicely Zuts!
Nice detail for a little TV!
cheers Gary

[iceman]

Nicely done Paul, you're coming along really quickly with the new camera now.

Always enjoyable images.

[peter_4059]

There's some nice detail in there Paul. Well done.

[KenGee]

Man what time did you go to sleep, it don't raise until 1 am. Have you got a wife that thinks your mad like I have? Great image.

[Ric]

A nice capture Paul, haven't seen much of this galaxy but it is certainly photogenic.

Cheers

[Zuts]

Thanks Theo.

The thing i cant understand is that the first two images I took were fine. All the stars were round to the edges. The 3rd showed some egginess and this showed a lot of egginess. This was taken at around 4.30 am in the morning and i noticed that i was no longer getting sub pixel guiding, it had jumps upto 1.5 pixels. This is why I assume my mount had settled and thrown the alignment out.



Thanks Gary.

The '85 performs quite well and is also great for visual. I think its a great all round scope. For galaxies though I would love a bit more image scale.



Hi Mike,

Thanks for the vote of confidence.



Hi Peter,

There is some detail, but as Gama says this may be a difficult object for a small scope. I took a similar hour of data on M83 from Glebe and got far more detail than this taken under dark skies. Still I am happy with the result.



Hi Ken,

Went to bed around 5am. I grabbed a few hours sleep in the car and then drove back to Sydney. I am fortunate/unfortunate to be seperated so only have to worry about the kids :)




Thanks for the comments Ric. It was 4am in the morning, I wanted at least one galaxy and stumbled across this one. I wanted a face on spiral but on a one minute test shot since it came out ok I kept on. Any more mucking around and I would have needed to swap the TV85 with a PST.


Paul

[RB]

A very nice result Paul and I bet the SBIG 2000 XCM is exciting to use, I'd love one !

Which mount are you using, you mentioned it had settled though the night.
Is it possible to use some square plywood under each leg to help with the settling?

[Zuts]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks. The SBIG is pretty forgiving and fun to use. I love the self guiding as I have enough clutter without the extra guidescope and conection. I am using an EQ6, plywood sounds like a good idea, or maybe lash out and get some suppression pads.

Paul

[jase]

Great work Paul. I think you need to get to dark sky sites more often. As you've realised processing data from such locations is a real pleasure. Certainly when you don't need to deal with major gradients. Over the past months you have certain boosted the quality of your imaging output. Keep up the good work.