Arp 94

[Annehouw]

Last March, I spent a week at Olly Penrice's place in Southern France to immerse myself in dark skies.

And dark they were.

Opting to spend rather more hours per target than do snapshots, only two images resulted of the week, but I am happy with the results.

The first one is this: Iwamoto and the flaming star  By far the most imaging time on this subject was by Olly himself. We have cooperated in imaging the comet and blending the comet with its beautiful background.

The other image is the one in this post. Arp 94 (NGC 3227 and NGC 3226) It is a subject which I do not see imaged often. Maybe because the opportunity this subject offers is not well known (I found it as a relatively large Arp Galaxy in The Arp Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies by Kanipe and Webb). Maybe it is because it is a bit hard to image.

It is quite close to the brigt star Sigma Leonis and as a result you have to work to avoid light streaking across the image. Both in imaging and in post processing.

We fought hard to reposition the scope in many ways to eliminate the light reflections while imaging, but the only way to completely eliminate them resulted in the main object being at a far corner of the image. Not good for composition. So, we opted to allow some light streaks and do cleanup in post processing. 20 hours of mono imaging was done at Olly's place and I added 7 hours of color imaging from my back garden observatory at home.

I had my first steps in PixInsight processing this image, but most of the heavy lifting in clean-up was done in Photoshop. 

For those who like to know more on the physics ,I have done a write up of NGC 3227 and NGC 3226 on Astrobin: Arp 94 by Annehouw on Astrobin

 

 

Edited July 31, 2019 by Annehouw

[Petergoodhew]

A remarkable image, well done.  I've been to Olly's place several times.  The sky is exceptionally dark there.

Edited July 31, 2019 by Petergoodhew

[cfpendock]

Oh yes.  My kind of image....

Chris