Arp 319 and NGC 7331

[Annehouw]

Late summer brings a lot of clear skies here in The Netherlands.  After that the stormy season starts to spoil a lot of the fun.

The RGB (OSC) images were all unguided 90 second exposures. I am a firm believer in dithering, but with my scope, using PHD2, this takes a minimum of 60 seconds per dither, which makes it not very efficient.  Luckily Astro Photography Tool has a dithering algorithm without the need for guiding, so I used that. It is very, very fast.

Ha signal was aquired with the same (QHY168C) camera using the STC DUO filter. This time with 360 seconds guided sub exposures (and dithering in PHD2).

Scope used was my backyard stationed 320mm f/3 hypergraph. Stars tend to saturate real quick with this setup, so I had to work quite hard to keep the stars small. The total integration time was about 16 hours. The subjects are not very faint, but with my Bortle 5 skies, I need a lot of integration time to bring out the objects in a nice way.

Software used: APT for acquisition, Astropixelprocessor for calibration, integration and registration, PixInsight for most of the postprocessing, Photoshop CS6 for the finishing touches.

More details and a larger version here: https://www.astrobin.com/qehqch/

[Graham Darke]

Fabulous image!

[maw lod qan]

Incredible! 

When I look at images like this, my mind goes into overload thinking what is out there we haven't seen yet.

We live in an amazingly beautiful universe.