NGC 2207 and IC 2163 - an active galaxy pair in Canis Major

[wimvb]

NGC 2207 and IC 2164 are very active, colliding galaxies in the constellation Canis Major. According to Wikipedia, they are at a distance of 81 +/- 39 Mly, while the Chandra observatory will have them at 130 Mly, so take your pick. The galaxies have had 3 supernovae in the past 20 years. The pair covers about 4.3' x 2.8' of the night sky, and needs a long FL. (The imaging telescope has a fl of 20 m.)

For me, this target is situated well below the horizon; data is from the Liverpool telescope in La Palma, Canary Islands

This is a HaRGB image, with 4 - 6 subs per channel. All subs were at most 2 minutes exposures, which gives a total time on target well below 1 hour.

The challenges in this image were sensor defects (?), and the Ha combination. Most of the images taken with the LT were to study supernovae, so framing varied, and I had to crop the image. Several subs had bad lines which I removed by using CanonBandingReduction on a small section of the image.

The small galaxy to the right of IC 2163 was not identified by either PixInsight or Astrometry.net. Another galaxy off to the lower left, had to be cropped due to stacking edges. (In the annotated image, RA goes from bottom to top, and DEC goes from right to left.)

This image is very much a work in progress, as I believe it has much more to offer than shown here.

[gorann]

Looks good Wim!

Very interesting object and pretty too, so a good catch in the LT fishing pond.

Let's see how far you take it in details and dust.

By the way, you say 20 m focal length but are you sure the camera (I assume you use subs from the wide field camera called IO:O) is not at the place of the secondary mirror, which is at 6 m. I have tried to figure this out from the LT site but found no info there more than than a suggestion that the scope can be run at f/10 or f/3.

[wimvb]

The primary mirror is f/3, while the whole scope is f/10. I think that most data is at f/10, ie a focal length if 20 m, and pixel resolution of 0.15 "/p, but I can be wrong about this. I will check.