NGC 3184 The Little Pinwheel Galaxy

[tomato]

This is just over 8 hrs of data on NGC 3184, the Little Pinwheel Galaxy in Ursa Major, captured over the previous two nights with the dual Esprit 150/ASI 178 set up. The subs were superior on the first night but 4 hrs was not enough data, adding the inferior data from last night has improved the final result. Again, a host of more distant galaxies are present in the image, I have run it through PI Imagesolver and annotation scripts, but most are not identified.

L 80 x 3 mins

RGB 26 x 3 mins each channel.

Calibrated and stacked in APP, processed in APP and AP.

Thanks for looking.

 

 

[MartinB]

Posted 20 hours ago and not a single comment!  What is the world coming to..  A beautiful job and difficult to appreciate that this is 40 million light years away.  Very nicely processed.  

[mackiedlm]

Super image, nice detail right in to the core.

[tomato]

53 minutes ago, MartinB said:

Posted 20 hours ago and not a single comment!  What is the world coming to..  A beautiful job and difficult to appreciate that this is 40 million light years away.  Very nicely processed.  

Thanks Martin, the background is a little messy due to a humungous dust bunny on the Lum camera. It was clearly evident on the flats but was not fully calibrated out by APP for some reason.  I am finally beginning to realise that data is king, I thought my large aperture dual rig could cut some corners, but on these kind of targets I need to be in double figures on the integration hours.

[tomato]

24 minutes ago, mackiedlm said:

Super image, nice detail right in to the core.

Thanks, I forgot to mention that I am binning the sensors 2x2, so I am imaging at 0.94 arcsec/pixel.

[Martin Meredith]

I was looking at/enthusing over this beautiful galaxy last week in EEVA mode and it is great to see what it actually looks like! Apart from the core, I found it a challenging object and I think its family resemblance in your excellent image to the likes of M101 or M61 might give the impression that it is quite a bright galaxy, whereas the spiral arms are actually quite faint.

Martin