Cetus A Finally (Maybe)

[DaveS]

I started this 2 years ago, but the first run of subs had a different cropping (And rotation) to the main lot so were unuseable.

Many, many thanks to @silentrunning who passed the luminance stack through Blur XT. Gonna have to buy a PI and Blur XT licence!

Anyway, this is the Cetus A / NGC 1055 group. Cetus A is the closest and brightest Seyfert galaxy, but "close" and "bright" are relative!

I collected 24 x 10 min and 48 x 5 min Bin 1 Luminance subs, but only 23 and 46 made it into the stack.

The RGB is a bit of a hodge-podge of 11 Blue, 19 Green, and 17 Red subs in G2v calibration (600 sec R, G, 1050 sec B ) but some of the subs were collected in Bin 1 by mistake, so it's difficult to quantify the relative exposures.

The Luminance data was stacked with a calibrated Flat and Bias only with the whole lot in the stack to average them.

Cetus A is bottom right, North is to the left.

I won't collect any more data this year (Maybe some better RGB next year) but will concentrate on improving my processing of what I have already.

[peter shah]

super image Dave

[DaveS]

Thanks Peter.

[geoflewis]

That's excellent Dave.

[DaveS]

Thanks Geof.

[bob-c]

A great image Dave.

Bob.

[DaveS]

Thanks Bob

[DaveS]

Following a suggestion by @geoflewis on our WA group I applied a touch of Levels and Curves in AstoArt.

I don't know, it's made the outer ring of Cetus A a bit noisy. Need more data!

[geoflewis]

49 minutes ago, DaveS said:

I don't know, it's made the outer ring of Cetus A a bit noisy. Need more data!

There's always a trade off Dave, but I prefer the brighter galaxies in your 2nd version. I will be interested to see what others think.

[DaveS]

Indeed. It's also made a bit of a mess of NGC 1055.

[DaveS]

I'm not sure how well it's showing on here, but in the original FITS on my 32" 4K monitor I can see a few knots of structure in the outer rings. Whether those are genuine galactic structures or foreground stars I'm not sure.

[DSviewer]

Great photo I'm still learning and this helps