Fornax Galaxy Cluster
18-May-2020
The Fornax Cluster is a cluster of 58 galaxies centered around 62 million light years distant.
The brightest member is the elliptical galaxy NGC 1316 at the top left, with a great barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 at the bottom right of the image. An interesting but dim irregular galaxy NGC 1427A is visible at the above the center of the leftmost edge of the image.
If you look really close at NGC 1427A, there is a small yellow smudge at about 2 o'clock. That's a Milky Way size spiral galaxy 1.3 billion light years away.
Image:
- 88x 300s CLS-CCD light pollution filter
- 40x 300s Red
- 34x 300s Green
- 35x 300s Blue
Total integration 16 hours 25 minutes. Focal length: 600mm
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond 80ED
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik CLS-CCD light pollution filter
- Astrodon RGB Gen2 E-Series Tru-Balance filters
- Starlight Xpress Lodestar X2 Autoguider
- Innovations Foresight ONAG
- Starlight Instruments Feather Touch Focuser
Location:
- Exposed over 6 nights between 19th November and 5th December 2019
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 10
- Captured with TheSkyX Professional
- Guiding with PHD2
- PixInsight: Calibrate, align, integrate, dynamic background extraction, LRGB combination, noise reduction, photometric color calibration, histogram, local histogram equalization, curves, crop.