Faint Spiral Galaxy IC5332
27-Sep-2017
IC 5332 is a very faint spiral galaxy 39 million light years away. It is a challenging target in light polluted skies. While processing the image I noticed several small galaxies around and in the background of its spiral arms. I'm interested in revisiting this target again with a longer focal length to see what detail I can tease from these.
Image:
- 52x 600s Luminance bin2x2
- 13x 600s Red bin2x2
- 16x 600s Green bin2x2
- 14x 600s Blue bin2x2
Total exposure 16 hours 50 minutes.
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond ED120
- SkyWatcher EQ8 Pro Mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik Typ2 LRGB filters
- Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
- Innovations Foresight On Axis Guider
- Starlight Instruments Focus Boss II
Location:
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
- Imaged over 4 nights, new moon.
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 9
- Captured with AstroArt 6
- Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
- FocusLock live focusing
- CCDInspector: Image analysis & rejection
- CCDStack 2+: Calibrate, align, stack, deconvolution, remove gradients, combine RGB.
- Photoshop CC: Shadows/highlights, noise reduction, high pass filter, combine L+RGB, curves, adjust colour balance, saturation, crop.