Flocculent Intermediate Spiral Galaxy in Leo - NGC3521

[MarsG76]

Hello All,

Sharing with you the last of my 6 pictures that I imaged across the 8 clear nights that I had between 21 April and 7 May.
This is NGC 3521 is a flocculent intermediate spiral galaxy located around 26 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Leo.

I think that this is a nice looking galaxy but unfortunately the end resulting image turned out quite soft, a lot softer than I was hoping for after seeing my initial subs.
The stars are looking a little bit bloated and fuzzy, but I know that I didn’t have condensation problem on the corrector plate or the camera sensor, so I’m suspecting that either (and most likely) the focus was slight off or the bubble of dust that is surrounding this galaxy is obscuring the hard details… I’m leaning toward focus (or seeing) being the biggest problem because the stars are fuzzy and I had tighter stars in the past at this focal length.
I’m going to have to re-image this galaxy in the future, perhaps revisit it next year.

Imaged using a 8" SCT (at the native 2032mm focal length), with a QHY268M camera on a HyperTuned CGEM mount.

The total exposure time of this image for all of the LRGB filters  was 12 hours and 1 minutes.
Exposures: L:14x600s @ FW:31 & L:6x600s, L:8x900s, R:12x120s & 7x180s, G:12x180s & 6x300s, B:12x300s & 7x600s, Hα:16x600s @ HCG:62/OFS:25

Clear Skies,

Mariusz

 

[Martin Meredith]

Thanks for posting this. Coincidentally, I observed NGC 3521 in EEVA mode on May 7th (just 5m20s worth) and thought I detected a dome of gas orthogonal to the plane of the galaxy, and your magnificent image confirms that there is definitely something there.

Martin