Galaxy Images

NGC6946 - Spiral Galaxy

Caldwell 12

Cygnus

06/09/23

Here's Caldwell 12, NGC6946, the Fireworks galaxy. Captured over three nights this week and last week, each time packing up before the night was over, due to the high humidity causing USB connections failures!

My last attempt at this target was a couple of years ago on fireworks night!

This galaxy was one of the targets in the TSS Monthly Challenge. It also won the TSS APOD award for 11/09/23

NGC 224

Messier 31

Spiral Galaxy 

Andromeda

19/08/23

4 x luminance, 4 x red, 4 x green and 4 x blue at 180 seconds

Here's the First Light image using my new ASI1600MM and LRGB filters. It's also the first LRGB image I've captured or processed. It's also the first image I've captured with the newly re-greased CGX. 

With my mount uncertainties, I chose M31, or to be more specific, the core of M31 as it's viewable from astronomical dusk to dawn without requiring a meridian flip. I set up a simple NINA sequence with no dithering, repeating until astronomical dawn. I kept it a bit too simple, I forgot to add a line for the auto focus routine! The mount took a couple of hours of calibrating and guiding assistant tweaking before it was happy to go. The guiding was poor all night, caused either by my sickly mount or the sickly seeing sitting directly under the jet stream as southern England was on the 19th. Or a combination of both.

Processed in Pixinsight after watching The Lazy Geek's My Simple LRGB Processing Workflow, an excellent tutorial.

NGC 5457

Messier 101 + SN2023ixf

Spiral Galaxy and Supervova 

Ursa Major

24/05/23

64 x 60 seconds unguided

A supernova was spotted in the Pinwheel Galaxy which was the incentive to capture my unfinished observatory first light image. I didn't manage to get the guide camera focussed so this is composed from 60 second unguided images. The supernova is at 10 o'clock at the start of the spiral arm. It's my first capture since August last year, a hiatus due to undergoing and recovering from radiotherapy. It's great to be back in the game!