A pair of galaxies
You might recall my last attempt at imaging a not-so-distance galaxy, NGC55 and how I managed to get a passable image with “only” 2 hours worth of data.
After a month of clouds and rain, I finally had the chance to take the imaging rig out and try to capture more data. I ended up with a total of 5 hours of images. 240 imaged of 60 seconds exposure, and 20 images of 180 seconds exposure.
All good, right? Wrong.
Due to the low elevation of NGC55, most of my images were tinted quite heavily with light pollution. It was only the last 2 hours or so (taken quite late, and with NGC55 almost vertically above me) that had a reasonably dark background.
I should have sifted through 260 frames and rejected all the ones with too much light pollution. But, me being me, decided to stack them all and see what I could make of the resulting mess. After a lot of stacking (with 3 different programs) and trying different configurations, I finally had a base image that I could take into Affinity Photo and work on.
I still have a long way to go when it comes to working with Affinity Photo, and a very long way to go when it comes to working with astro images. However, I’m reasonably happy with what came out. It’s not a fantastic image, but if you don’t zoom in too far, and you don’t look too closely, it’s not bad.
Here’s NGC 55, aka ‘The Whale Galaxy’. It’s about 6.5 million light years from earth, so very close (in astronomical terms, anyway!) and one of the brighter galaxies in the southern sky.
NGC55
NGC300 is close to NGC55, and it is suggested that the two galaxies are gravitationally bound to each other.
Unlike NGC55, NGC300 is almost face-on to us, so we can see the intricate spiral pattern of it’s arms, with the bright core and regions of gas and dust where stars are actively being formed. There are several stars that are between earth and NGC300 - those bright blobs are (obviously) not part of NGC300.
The image below is the result of stacking 180 frames, each 60 seconds long and then manipulated with Affinity Photo.
