NGC 5033

[tony210]

Here is NGC 5033 a Seyfert galaxy in Canes Venatici- about 40million light years distant.

I took this with a 12inch RCT in Worthing in April- about 30x10mins luminance and 4x5mins RGB each.

Processed with PixInsight and Photoshop.

I has a lot of difficulty processing as the galaxy’s arms fade into background sky and I had to deal with gradients and noise very carefully with multiple techniques. Also, the core is very bright and getting core detail is challenging. My set up is oversampled and deconvolution is very important so I had to try to master decon in Pixinsight. I found the script PSF Image very useful and once I had a good PSF and had worked on the local deringing settings it worked pretty well but this is a far as I could go.

I might try binning 2x2 next season as this would bring the image scale up to 1.3 arcsec/pixel which is more realistic for my skies but when I tried this in the past the results were not great not entirely sure why.

Edited July 24, 2020 by tony210

[MarkAR]

That's a really well done galaxy, managed to tame the core enough and still keep the faint outer wispiness.

[tony210]

Thanks Mark - was not an easy target and some of my subs were not great but made me look at Pixinsight in much more detail so that's a benefit I guess. Not sure it looks like a Waterbug though...

Edited July 24, 2020 by tony210

[MarkAR]

It's much better than my version. 

Wonder who came up with the name, the only real reference I found was when using Stellarium.