Grus Quartet
20-Aug-2017
The Grus-Quartet consists of four large spiral galaxies, between 63 and 99 million light years away, which are so close to each other that they are interacting.
Image:
- 75x 450s Luminance bin2x2
- 18x 450s Red bin2x2
- 18x 450s Green bin2x2
- 18x 450s Blue bin2x2
Total exposure 16 hours 8 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 3 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, combine L+RGB, noise reduction, curves, adjust colour balance, saturation, crop.