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Leo Triplet Tidal Tail in 2 hours


ShineOn

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We all know that data is king in this game and that less is hardly ever more.  But....when the prevailing conditions are in your favour, ie, you happen to find yourself under some of the darkest skies in Europe and your host for the week is a certain Mr O Penrice, interesting things can happen!

And so it was on the day of our arrival at Les Granges. We were greeted by clear skies and the promise of some class A photon gathering. I'd decided to image the Leo trio as it was an object I'd never captured and I knew it would be a good fit for my Tak 85 at native FL coupled with my Atik 460.  I'd framed the image up to centralise the galaxies in the field of view and the first 10 minute sub looked very nice.

It was at this point though that Olly glanced at my capture screen and floated the idea that I might like to try for the extremely faint tidal tail emanating from the Hamburger galaxy. The carrot was dangled and I didn't really need to think twice, as I reframed to push the galaxies down the FOV in the hope of bagging the tail. But, 10 minute exposures were not going to do the trick here, so I took Olly's advice and upped the exposure to 30 minutes in luminance.

Everything came together well and the Tak/Atik combo did it's thing.  Approaching cloud and a rising moon however brought proceedings to a premature end though with the following data captured:

4 x 30 mins Luminance

4 x 3 mins in each of RGB

Cloudy skies since have meant plenty of time to process this data which Olly expertly executed entirely, using Astro Art 5, PixInsight, Registar and Photoshop. This is the end result and is an outcome we're extremely happy with, given the low integration time.

Simon

post-19510-0-22272700-1398182934_thumb.p

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Awesome and very detailed capture!

If you look closely at that Galaxy, you can see one of the dustlanes has a twin that is slightly tilted.

Gonna read more about this interesting galaxy.

EDIT: Found this, showing the tidal effects. Article found here: http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-3881/115/6/2331/fulltext/970514.text.html

fg1.h.gif

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This is the most remarkable capture that I've ever had a hand in processing. The Leo tidal tail is supposed to be faint. Excuse me, this is a mere two hour luminance capture. Two hours. You might expect that to scratch the surface but no, this is a stunningly deep tidal tail.  Check the net. ShineOn's image is getting on for being as deep as it gets.

I started a thread a while back arguing that monochrome CCD is by far the fastest imaging system available. This is a sub three hour capture at F5.3. You can beat that in a DSLR or one shot colour system? I am ready to be corrected but I really don't think you will.

More colour for this would be great but the weather I am providing for my guests at the moment is embarrasingly awful. I can only grovel!!!! Shine On has been very nice about it!

Olly

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This is the most remarkable capture that I've ever had a hand in processing. The Leo tidal tail is supposed to be faint. Excuse me, this is a mere two hour luminance capture. Two hours. You might expect that to scratch the surface but no, this is a stunningly deep tidal tail.  Check the net. ShineOn's image is getting on for being as deep as it gets.

I started a thread a while back arguing that monochrome CCD is by far the fastest imaging system available. This is a sub three hour capture at F5.3. You can beat that in a DSLR or one shot colour system? I am ready to be corrected but I really don't think you will.

More colour for this would be great but the weather I am providing for my guests at the moment is embarrasingly awful. I can only grovel!!!! Shine On has been very nice about it!

Olly

I was just waiting before you started that discussion again. LOL!

The ICX674 is a formidable sensor when it comes to sensitivity. It has a very high QE. Which definitely helps getting the faint details quicker in objects like these. The QE of your very expensive KAI11002 sensor dwarfs against the ICX674, but that's not the strength of these type of sensors. The Kodak sensors excell at FOV and showing more depth in images.

Again, only fair comparison here would be to put the Atik 460EXM next up to it's twin sister the 460EXC and compare the results afterwards. :cool:

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