Steven,
You must be onto something if even the pros find your image to be excellent.
Your version qualifies as the best image of several that I have seen of the Carina dwarf spheroidal galaxy.
To my eye, Carina does at least look like a galaxy rather than a random field of stars, at least
after the "eye+brain system" tries to remove the rich star-field of foreground bright Milky Way stars. (Professional astronomers are always "cleaning" galaxy images, by removing the foreground stars from images, prior to doing photometry, by using various software techniques)
The Carina Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy itself, in images, looks to me like it is defined by a "cloud" of very faint stars that at least seem to be of comparable brightness to each other.
I will, here, give a general perspective on dSph galaxies, for the benefit of all of the IIS members......
It is hard to resist the impression that a dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxy looks like a giant-sized "vastly expanded" globular star cluster,
But dSph galaxies, as a population of galaxies, are:
(1) much much more physically extended, for any given total luminosity, than globular star clusters.
(2) kinematically distinct from globular star clusters.
(3) very Dark Matter dominated (a globular has enough gravity to stop itself from flying apart without the need for any Dark Matter content)
(4) always dominated by old-to-intermediate aged stars, but with diverse star forming histories. Some dSph galaxies have only an 'old' (9-13 billion years old) stellar population , but others of these galaxies have had multiple episodes of star formation, with some of them experiencing low-level star formation even in the present day.
(5) Diverse in their kinematics. For instance, some dSph galaxies have disky (flattened) kinematics and shapes, which tends to contradict the "spheroidal" description.
As there are some newly discovered dSph galaxies that are so poor in stars that the
total light of such a galaxy is equivalent to that of a single -1 absolute magnitude star......it seems it is only the need for Dark Matter to hold together these ultra-faint galaxies that distinguishes such a faint galaxy from a star cluster. Not that a -1 absolute magnitude object fits the usual mental picture of a "majestic galaxy"!!
Here are four useful resources about the nearby Dwarf Galaxies in the Local Group of Galaxies and in its nearby environment:
(1) Catalog and description of all known (as of 2012) dwarf galaxies in and around the Local Group ::
http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/144/1/4/article
(2) Igor Karachentsev's
Updated Nearby Galaxy Catalog is the "Encyclopaedia Galactica" of nearby galaxies, listing all known galaxies within 11 Mpc ::
(and the vast majority of them are tiny systems of low luminosity)
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Brows...eargalcat.html
AND
http://www.sao.ru/lv/lvgdb/introduction.php
(
additional information on this website)
(3) Here is a very clear and very concise overview paper about the faintest-known local dwarf galaxies:
http://www.publish.csiro.au/?act=vie...id=AS11023.pdf
(4) Here is a long, technical, but clearly-written, review paper about the dwarf galaxies in the Local Group of galaxies. (This paper is: 2009, ARAA,
47, 371 )
http://www.astro.rug.nl/~etolstoy/tolstoyhilltosi09.pdf
cheers,
Robert