Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744
21-Nov-2020
NGC 6744 (Caldwell 101) is a spiral galaxy about 31 million light-years away, tilted towards our line of sight. It is thought to be one of the most Milky Way-like spiral galaxies in our immediate vicinity. It also has at least one distorted companion galaxy similar to the Magellanic Clouds.
Image:
- 108x 300s Luminance
- 53x 300s Red
- 46x 300s Green
- 112x 300s Blue
Total integration 26 hours, 35 minutes. Focal length: 1960mm
Hardware:
- Celestron 11" EdgeHD
- Celestron 0.7x EdgeHD focal reducer
- Skywatcher EQ8 Pro mount
- QSI 683-ws8 Camera @ -15°C
- Astrodon LRGB 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 to 27th April 2020
- 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, HDR multiscale transform, curves, crop.