NGC 1532 Tidal Tails
25-Dec-2017
50 million light years away, NGC 1532 is slowly devouring one of its companion dwarf galaxies, NGC 1531. Large tidal tails from NGC 1532 are thrown outwards as the two galaxies interact. A number of other dwarf companion galaxies are also visible in the frame.
Image:
- 91x 300s Luminance
- 18x 300s Red
- 13x 300s Green
- 14x 300s Blue
Total exposure 11 hours 20 minutes.
Hardware:
- Skywatcher Black Diamond 120ED
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik Typ 2c Luminance, Deep Sky RGB 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 5 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.
- Pixinsight 1.8: Crop, dynamic background extraction, deconvolution, TGV denoise, MMT denoise, MT star reduction, histogram stretch, local histogram enhancement, HDR multiscale transform, ATrous wavelet transform, linear fit RGB, background neutralisation, color calibration, SCNR, LRGB combination, saturation.