Spanish Dancer Galaxy - NGC1566
08-Dec-2015
Shot over four consecutive nights, the Spanish Dancer is a spiral galaxy ~38 million light years distant in the southern sky.
Image:
- 30x 480s luminance bin1x1 + 60x flat + 37x dark + 120x bias
- 8x 240s luminance bin1x1 + 60x flat + 37x dark + 120x bias
- 20x 300s red bin2x2 + 24x flat + 40x dark + 120x bias
- 10x 300s green bin2x2 + 24x flat + 40x dark + 120x bias
- 10x 300s blue bin2x2 + 24x flat + 40x dark + 120x bias
Total exposure time: 7 hours 52 minutes.
Hardware:
- Celestron EdgeHD 1100 with CGEM DX mount
- QSI 683-wsg Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik Type 2c LRGB filters
- Orion StarShoot Autoguider
- Starlight Xpress Adaptive Optics
Location:
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
- Good seeing + waning crescent moon.
Software:
- Captured with AstroArt 6
- Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
- Aladin 8.0: Planning & camera alignment.
- CCDInspector: Image analysis & rejection
- CCDStack 2+: Calibrate, align, normalize, stack, curves, combine RGB.
- Astra Image 4.0: Denoise, upscale RGB.
- Photoshop CC: Reduce noise, high pass filter, shrink stars, shadows/highlights, integrate L+RGB, color balance, contrast.