NGC4565 - The Needle Galaxy

[ShineOn]

A first light in a sense here, as it's my first successful outing using my new Atik OAG with the MN190. Getting the guide cam and Atik 460 parfocal proved a bit of a challenge for a while and I'm not convinced that my QHY5 is sensitive enough in this set-up. Lodestar may be the way to go... Imaged over 2 nights it comprises 3hrs 15 luminance data (10 min subs) followed by RGB of 25:40:35 in 5 minute subs. Conditions were not as favourable last night, hence the lack of RGB data. All subs unbinned.

For fellow Atik users out there, the recently introduced 'marker mode' in Artemis proved useful in accurate alignment for the second night's session. Just click on some prominent stars from Session 1, save them, and then reload a text file at the next session to enable easy framing. The individual channels were stacked in Nebulosity and aligned in Registar. I then combined the LRGB in PS using this tutorial from Anna Morris: http://www.eprisephoto.com/create-lrgb. The High Pass filter in PS proved useful in bringing out the dust lanes.

The fact that this object passed the meridian at around 11pm meant for satisfyingly lazy data acquisition as I slept through it all and dreamt of a laptop full of data for the morning

Simon

[peter shah]

beautiful capture super colour and detail

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Wonderful capture of a magnificent object. Lovely

[Gina]

Excellent image I must give the new Artemis markers a go - been using AstroTortilla to position my targets so far.

[Coco]

Stunning... beautiful... maybe make some of the obvious stars rounder as a final flourish but even so its wonderful..

You made me re think about re visiting it again for the fourth season running

[sologuitarist61]

What a cracking image - lots of detail and the colour is a nice bonus as well!

[AlistairHowie]

Excellent image I must give the new Artemis markers a go - been using AstroTortilla to position my targets so far.

AT will recenter the target for you, but the markers will let you get your camera rotation right. Now, if CCD manufacturers would just make round CCD chips ....

[ShineOn]

Thanks for the nice comments everyone.

@Coco - agreed, the stars could be rounder. I included a few below par rgb subs that if I'd had more data I would have discarded.