Some Northern Galaxy Groups

[aparker]

Finally had a chance to get an evening's observing in.  Ticking off Herschel objects in the UMa / Gem / LMi region.  It's a funny obsession but I always see a couple really neat things along with the faint fuzzies.  First is NGC2683 in Lynx.  You can see a whole host of little PGCs in the background.  This one's close by at 16 MLY.

BTW all these are with my new Optec reducer which is giving me an EFL of 1360 mm (f/6.6 with the C8).  Notice how flat the field is and the relative lack of vignetting for this modestly stretched image.  Also tried skipping the LP filter for this evening, to see how it impacted sensitivity.  I'll try some direct +/- comparisons next time out.

Pushing the stretch to the limit in the next one to reveal structure in the face-on spiral NGC2805 (upper left); lower right are edge-on spirals NGC2814, 2820, 2820A.  These are in UMa.

 

Also in Ursa Major, the bright edge-on barred spirals are NGC2854 and 2856, while the beautiful face-on one is NGC2857.  This latter is 225 MLY away, and shows an astonishing amount of detail for that distance; if it was closer would be utterly spectacular.  Imagine what this would look like at the range of M81 or M51.

Ten times closer, in Leo, NGC2903.  While I spend most of the time on these junkets looking at new DSOs, you have to stop by an old favorite occasionally...

 

Another close-by face-on spiral, NGC3184 (UMa) at 25 MLY:

Finally, NGC3344 in Leo Minor.  Partially obscured by foreground stars, but what can you do - wait for them to move?

This one also has a dense scattering of background galaxies to the top of the image.

This series of captures has me eagerly awaiting SLL v3.  Pixel binning should really help me here, as the image scale of the Ultrastar at this FL has me at 0.97 arcsec/pixel - way too oversampled.  2x2 or possibly even 3x3 binning would not impact the detail captured here at all, and I'd love to see what would happen with 4X (or even 9X) sensitivity.  

 

[Martin Meredith]

Fantastic images Alex! Lovely collection of face-on spirals, each more spidery than the last. It goes to show how many really interesting objects there are available to the EAAer and that are capable of yielding up a lot of detail. 

BTW Have you got Mark Bratton's Herschel book? Its one of my favourites and I use it to find targets occasionally. I think the image detail you're getting isn't so far from the the plates in that book...

You can really see the value of a longer FL. Sometimes I think we go all out for speed but with live stacking we can trade speed for detail and still get the image updating quickly. Makes me want to get the Barlow out again.

Martin

[DoctorD]

Hi Alex

Great images - some I need to add to my next observing session - NGC2903 looks like it has a great amount of detail!

CS

Paul

[aparker]

3 hours ago, Martin Meredith said:

Fantastic images Alex! Lovely collection of face-on spirals, each more spidery than the last. It goes to show how many really interesting objects there are available to the EAAer and that are capable of yielding up a lot of detail. 

BTW Have you got Mark Bratton's Herschel book? Its one of my favourites and I use it to find targets occasionally. I think the image detail you're getting isn't so far from the the plates in that book...

You can really see the value of a longer FL. Sometimes I think we go all out for speed but with live stacking we can trade speed for detail and still get the image updating quickly. Makes me want to get the Barlow out again.

Martin

Thanks Martin.  I do indeed have Mark Bratton's book.  I sometimes peruse it on cloudy nights as a placebo...

The FL I'm at now certainly works for a lot of these smaller galaxy targets, although it is not practical for e.g. Most emission nebulae.  I am dying to try it out with binning.  I was just reflecting that binned 3x3 my setup should give essentially the same photographic speed as would the Ultrastar unbinned on a Hyperstar lens (albeit over only 1/9 of the image area).  

[Paul81]

Lovely galaxy session!

Currently in V3 binning options are 1x1, 2x2 and 4x4. I'll be leaving it at that for V3.0, but will take a note to investigate 3x3 for a later (minor) update.

[Astrojedi]

Fantastic images Alex with incredible detail. I need to dust off my Celestron 6.3. Any reason you picked the Optec over the Celestron?

[RobertI]

Some wonderful galaxies there Alex, this is a great time of year for EAA. My limited viewing does not allow me to see may of the best galaxies so it is nice to see other people's captures.

[laudropb]

Lovely set of images.

[aparker]

7 hours ago, Astrojedi said:

Fantastic images Alex with incredible detail. I need to dust off my Celestron 6.3. Any reason you picked the Optec over the Celestron?

Celestron offers a 0.7x reducer for the EdgeHD scopes, while the Optec is (nominally) 0.62x.  And I think the Optec is a bit less expensive, although neither is cheap.