The Flying Ghost Galaxy and a couple of asteroids

[lukebl]

Hi folks. I imaged this interesting pair of colliding galaxies last night, NGC 520. Apparently called the Flying Ghost Galaxy and discovered by William Herschel. To its upper right is PGC5195, a 16th magnitude spiral galaxy.

Aside from the issues I'm having with collimating my RC (A newt is a doddle compared to this), my guiding has been a bit iffy so I thought I would try it with a lot of short exposures. This is the result of 170 x 2 minute exposures, plus 15 x 1 minute binned 2x for RGB. Rather disappointed at the lack of detail. But it's quite diffuse and would clearly benefit from some more and longer exposures. 203 mm f/8 Ritchey-Chretien, Atik428ex. Field of view: 18.6 x 14 Arcmin, Pixel scale 0.578 arcsec/pixel.

I noticed on the lower-left of the subs a moving star, which turns out to be 16th magnitude asteroid 3117 Niepce discovered in 1983 and named after Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, credited with taking the first ever photograph. Here's an animation of it. Each frame was 20 minutes apart.

A quick run through Astometrica revealed a couple of other fainter asteroids, numbers 20905 and 345190, of which I know little apart from the fact that the former was discovered in 1960 and the latter in 2005. This is a no-frills stack using 'Track and Stack' in Astrometrica showing the three. Interestingly, they are all moving at approximately the same rate and direction. Often when I've captured multiple asteroids, they move in very different speeds and directions to each other.

Edited October 28, 2019 by lukebl

[ApophisAstros]

Nice post , in the animation there are a couple of stars that seem to switch off after a very short time are these artefacts in processing or something weirder?

Roger