NGC 2403 galaxy

[timc]

Attached is an image of the intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 2403 in the constellation Camelopardalis.  This galaxy lies about 8m light years away and as it lies close to the northern celestial pole it is visible for most of the year from the northern hemisphere. It has numerous H II star forming regions (the red patches in this image) and is visible using binoculars or a small telescope. I imaged this target over 5 nights between 26 March and 3 April 2022 from my back garden observatory in Oxted, but I’ve only recently finished off the image processing. The image consists of the following sub-exposures: L unbinned 50x 300s; for each of R, G, B 29 x 300s binned x2 and Ha 25 x300s binned x2, making a total of 13 hours and 30 minutes of imaging time. I used a Celestron Edge 11 HD reflector operating at f/10 with a Moravian Instruments G2 8300 CCD camera, a Paramount MX and Lodestar 2 guide camera.  Image capture was done with Maxim DL and I used CCD Stack2, Photoshop CS5 and Topaz denoise AI for further processing.  Merry Christmas everyone and thanks for looking!

Tim C

[drja...@aol.com]

An amazing image Tim with all those star forming regions showing up so clearly.  You've obviously managed to process those very well. 

Merry Christmas

James

Sent from my iPad

On 24 Dec 2024, at 09:22, timc <tcos...@gmail.com> wrote:



Attached is an image of the intermediate spiral galaxy NGC 2403 in the constellation Camelopardalis.  This galaxy lies about 8m light years away and as it lies close to the northern celestial pole it is visible for most of the year from the northern hemisphere. It has numerous H II star forming regions (the red patches in this image) and is visible using binoculars or a small telescope. I imaged this target over 5 nights between 26 March and 3 April 2022 from my back garden observatory in Oxted, but I’ve only recently finished off the image processing. The image consists of the following sub-exposures: L unbinned 50x 300s; for each of R, G, B 29 x 300s binned x2 and Ha 25 x300s binned x2, making a total of 13 hours and 30 minutes of imaging time. I used a Celestron Edge 11 HD reflector operating at f/10 with a Moravian Instruments G2 8300 CCD camera, a Paramount MX and Lodestar 2 guide camera.  Image capture was done with Maxim DL and I used CCD Stack2, Photoshop CS5 and Topaz denoise AI for further processing.  Merry Christmas everyone and thanks for looking!

Tim C

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[tcos...@gmail.com]

Thanks for your kind comments James – much appreciated

Tim

James

 

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[William Bottaci]

Hello Tim
This galaxy is a very good object to image; relatively large and bright amongst deep sky objects,some notable nebulae and well placed for our latitude, and high up at this time of the year. It should be a target for anyone imaging deep sky objects...
It was a good idea to also take exposures with a hydrogen alpha filter in addition to the others due to plenty of large nebulae (which are mostly hydrogen and shine in that red light), and you've certainly brought out both features and colour in good detail. A nice image to look at; well done, and thank you for sharing this.

A belated Happy New Year to you; I was delayed in replying to this post.

William

[tcos...@gmail.com]

Thanks for your kind comments William – much appreciated.

Tim C

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[Trev S]

Hi Tim, This is a very nice image. I find galaxies quite difficult to process, mainly due to the contrast between the bright centre and the fainter outer regions. You have captured this nicely.

[tcos...@gmail.com]

Thanks very much for your comments Trev – much appreciated. Re handling contrast, it can also be a big problem in imaging some nebula (eg the Orion Nebula) and globular clusters such as M13. There are ways of dealing with it in processing (eg adjusting levels in specific areas of the image to bring down the bright bits or bring up the darker bits) and/or by blending images of longer and shorter duration to get detail in bright and dark areas.  Can be tricky though and if the detail is not in the data, it’s not possible to get it into the image!

Tim C

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