NGC7640

NGC 7640 is an 11^th magnitude barred spiral galaxy located in Andromeda about 28 million light years distant and 90 000 light years in diameter.  Due to the orientation with respect to the Earth, it’s almost edge on and so not much of the spiral arms are visible, however, if you look closely you can see a spiral structure.  It’s a somewhat neglected target, which is probably due the much brighter neighbouring galaxy NGC 7331.

To enhance the colour structures in the central bar, I acquired Ha data which I blended into the red channel via continuum subtraction.  To avoid the image being dominated by the starfield, I split the galaxy and starfield processing and blended a low field star stretch into a high stretch of the galaxy and the faint background galaxies.