Showpieces in Canes Venatici

[catburglar]

My observing site is "obstructed" to the North East by my house and to the South East  by a dome of light pollution from a nearby industrial complex. As a result, I'm often observing things through the LP or when they're past transit and on their way down into the murk of the horizon.

At about 10:30 last night a realised that Canes Venatici had cleared my roofline and wasn't yet in the light polluted skies of my south east perspective. I hadn't planned anything, so I went for a couple of showpiece Messiers- I've observed them visually before but these are my first EEVA observations of them. These are not really in the spirit of my previous EEVA observations, where I'm usually looking at stuff that's off the beaten track. But I have to say I am wowed by what these capture. In my skies I struggle to see spiral detail in these galaxies on all but the best of nights, and although it's not really visible in the cropped view of M94 because I've clipped the background a little, I actually captured the faint outer halo, which I've never seen in my 10 inch before.

 

For info- I've taken advantage of the new sharpening and noise reduction tools- they work a treat, although if pushed too far they can generate ring artefacts around bright stars and take away a little too much of the faint background...but that's the same with all post processing- less is usually more.

 

So a big thanks to @Martin Meredith for developing jocular- it's the interactivity and lossless nature of the application (I can always go back and reprocess a stack in near real time)- that got me interested in EEVA, and to the contributors to this EEVA observing thread, it generates lots of new and interesting objects to to add to my observing list on the next clear night- even from my suboptimal location. 

 

[AKB]

11 hours ago, catburglar said:

I've taken advantage of the new sharpening and noise reduction tools

Would be most interested in seeing the FITs files of these captures (stacked).  The noise looks of a slightly different nature from what I’m used to seeing (maybe pixel resolution?) and I’d be interested in using these as benchmarks for further noise suppression development.

Thanks if possible to PM them.

Tony

Edited March 26, 2022 by AKB

[AKB]

@catburglar was gracious enough to send me the raw stacks of the above images, in order to investigate the potential of Jocular's latest noise suppression.

Here are the results which I managed to get, and which are arguably a small improvement on those he showed.

I'll post some further guidance / suggestions for parameter settings on the Jocular thread itself.

Tony

 

[PatG]

Hi All

I also had a productive EAA session in Canes Venatici on Friday evening.

My captures are far inferior by comparison to Catburglar's above but none the less it is so rewarding to be able to 'observe' these objects in a quick session after work on a Friday night!

The haul included: M51, M63, NCG 4631, NGC 5371,  M3 and Hickson 68.

All captured in SLL, using a 100mm refractor and Lodestar Mono x2 with circa 0.5 FR. 

As always comments / feedback welcome. 

Pat

 

 

[PatG]

Also Looking at the capture of NGFC 5371 again, there is a fuzzy blob to bottom RHS, I have circled on the image below. I have cross checked against a Webb Society Megastar chart (see link below) for this area and it is annotated as MAC1354+4015 - Any idea how I can find out what this object is?

Webb Deep-Sky Society: Galaxy of the Month: Hickson 68 (webbdeepsky.com)

 

 

[Martin Meredith]

Hi Pat

Its a while since I used SLL but are you using the linear stretch function here or the X^0.25 or asinh? From your captures I would hazard a guess that you are using linear? I generally found one of the nonlinear stretch functions did a better job of not blowing out the cores of galaxies/clusters. 

I was also in Canes Venatici last night but with my 77mm refractor and eyepiece. M51 was a couple of fuzzy blobs, one perhaps slightly larger than the other... 

Martin 

[Martin Meredith]

5 minutes ago, PatG said:

Also Looking at the capture of NGFC 5371 again, there is a fuzzy blob to bottom RHS, I have circled on the image below. I have cross checked against a Webb Society Megastar chart (see link below) for this area and it is annotated as MAC1354+4015 - Any idea how I can find out what this object is?

Webb Deep-Sky Society: Galaxy of the Month: Hickson 68 (webbdeepsky.com)

 

 

You could look it up on Simbad: http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

The approach I sometimes use is via Aladin: https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/; enter NGC 5371, click the Simbad checkbox, check out the designation of the MAC object, and enter that into Simbad to see more information.

[PatG]

Thanks Martin - very helpful. Found it on the Aladin website - Its UGC 8841, a smaller spiral type SABb at circa 120mly. 

[Bill S]

I put your picture through astrometry.net to plate-solve it and then loaded it into ASTAP to annotate the DSOs.

PGC 49480 is also catalogued as UGC 8841.  You can look in Simbad etc for more information.

e.g. https://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=UGC++8841

Just got my contribution ready to post and saw you had sorted it out anyway.

Cheers

Bill

Edited March 27, 2022 by Bill S