Over Father's Day weekend, I joined my local astro crew heading out to the wheatbelt region to do some astrophotography under Bortle 1 skies. The weather was crystal clear and freezing cold; by dawn ice formed on our cars, tents, and camping chairs. Despite having a warm sleeping bag in my swag, it was still miserably cold but nice to sleep under the stars nevertheless.
Despite rising to max of 47deg, with no light pollution toward the north, I thought I'd give NGC7479 (Cadwell 44), or also known as the Superman Galaxy located in Pegasus. a shot. It's a small target with approx 3.6 x 2.7 arcmin even for my Takahashi µ250CRS at native 2500mm. I just kept to this single target the whole night.
Specs of the acquisition is as follows :-
ASI6200MM Pro at Gain 0 Offset 50 -10C Bin1 with Antlia Pro LRGB filters
R: 6x 600 (1hr)
G: 6x 600 (1hr)
B: 10x 600 (1hr 40 mins)
L: 9x 600 (1hr 30 mins)
Total: 5 hrs 10 mins
Processing was done with PixInsight and cropped quite a bit (due to the sensor being FF). I'm still learning LRGB processing so I think there's much room for improvement. My stars do look bloated somewhat. Will get there eventually.
Thx for the feedback folks! Yes did try to use StarNet but I think I made my mistake of DynamicCropping it way early in the stage and did all the processing on a much smaller cropped image (where stars look bigger). I probably should have done minimal cropping first, do the processing then crop on the galaxy last.
I'm actually not certain when it got the name actually. I found searching NGC7479 gets more hits on AB than Superman. Quite possibly, it's a new nickname.
I think to image this one well, I'd need to larger than my current 10" 250CRS. I saw a version captured by 14" RC and that really has the resolution to capture the details.
