Good (cold) weather and almost the longest night of the year, allowed me to collect all the data for this image through 5 filters (LHaRGB) in a single night.
While many are attracted to the more famous and photogenic Fighting Dragons in Ara, there are also some nice galaxies to shoot in this starry area too.
Once again I only had to chuck one single sub from the whole nights almost 8hr data set...aaand manually turning the dome throughout plus a manual meridian flip and re-target
This was a good data set, no darks were used, no noise reduction was used nor any gradient removal, it was enjoyable to process (to 2am in the morning
) .
At 50 Million light years distance and 60,000 light years across, NGC 6300 in Ara is a galaxy with a relatively modest angular size of 4.3' X 2.8' and shines at magnitude 11 so not an easy target. Although it is not often imaged, it does have beautiful spiral arms with many fine dust lanes that are connected by a straight bar that runs through the middle of the galaxy. NGC 6300 is not a standard spiral galaxy, it is actually a type II Seyfert galaxy. Like most galaxies NGC 6300 is thought to contain a massive black hole at its heart some 300 000 times more massive than the Sun. This black hole is emitting high energy X-rays as galactic material is pulled into it.
Anyway, enjoy this quicky one nighter....
Full Frame
Close up
Some more galaxies in Ara are is in the processing pipeline, so stay tuned
Mike