OH NO Centaurus A

[Hagar]

Suffering a serious withdrawal from imaging due to smoke and bad weather I grabbed the chance last night to shoot a few frames of Centaurus A.
8 X 10minute Luminance images of this Galaxy, Taken with:
QHY9 Mono CCD with Custom Scientific Lum filter Through my Tak FS102 with the reducer/flattener fitted. It could probably have done with the extra focal length without the reducer but ends up with a much flatter field and quite a few stars in the surrounding sky.
When time and the weather permits I will take some RGB to add to this but until then this is the best I could do.
The image started out as 10 X 10 min images but some small glitch in the guiding caused me to discard 2 of them. The image has been fully calibrated using Darks Flats and bias frames.

Comments welcome.

[iceman]

Looks nice Doug, stars look nice and tight.

What's a crop of the galaxy look like?

[Alchemy]

dust lanes look nice and contrasty , the halo is nicely extended, more subs to bring it to life with color is required , still if you are smoked out it is difficult.

skies were clear here last night too.

[Hagar]

Here is the crop, Still needs a bit of work.

[gbeal]

Nice Doug.
Shoot it with the Vixen. I ended up shooting it with my recently acquired M703 (so at 1800mm focal length) and was quite pleased with it.
The reduced uncropped version looks nicer than the cropped version to me, but has a bit of a gradient perhaps?
Gary

[bloodhound31]

That's just lovely Doug.

Baz.

[spacezebra]

Hi Doug

This is stunning! What a massive amount of detail.

Cheers Petra d.

[desler]

Doug,


What a lovely clean / crisp image. Worth the wait!

Darren

[TrevorW]

Good one Doug

[spearo]

super crisp stars
well done!
nice detail in the lanes
frank

[RobF]

Very nice!

[Hagar]

Thanks for the comments everyone. Looking forward to adding some RGB when I can get it.

[peter_4059]

Lovely image Doug. That imaging combination is obviously working well - stars are sharp right to the edge and there's a lot of faint detail around the galaxy. Can't wait to see some RGB data added.

Peter

[bluescope]

All looking good there Doug ... nice round pinpoint stars ... will be good when you add your RGB ... give it some life.

:thumbsup:

[Hagar]

Thanks Steve. All takes such a long time and trying to image 10 minute exposures between clouds takes a bit longer. Hopefully I will manage some RGB tonight between the clouds.

[jase]

Nice work Doug. Looking forward to the addition of RGB. If your luminance data is anything to go by, the end result should be rather spectacular.