Attempt at NGC3226 - Arp94

[ONIKKINEN]

5-ish hours:

Annotated:

Hoped to get more data on this but the season has now ended and headed for the 4 month long summer break, which feels weird since just 2 nights ago i was scraping frost off my telescope 🤪. @ollypenrice did mention that the tidal tail was faint but i had to see it for myself, it is REALLY faint. Too faint for my attempt in fact, even with careful masked stretches it has ruined the background with mottling. There was also a reflection from Algieba just off the screen in the red channel which took some brute-force gradient removing to get rid of which may have made the tidal tail recovery attempts more difficult.

Comments, critique welcome of course

-Oskari

[ollypenrice]

Bravo! The most reassuring thing, when chasing faint tidal tails, is to find good agreement with other imagers working independently. I think our results are, indeed, in decent agreement. Nice agreement also on PGC30397. I particularly like your bold red stars as well.

Olly

[ONIKKINEN]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

Bravo! The most reassuring thing, when chasing faint tidal tails, is to find good agreement with other imagers working independently. I think our results are, indeed, in decent agreement. Nice agreement also on PGC30397. I particularly like your bold red stars as well.

Olly

I tried not to look at your, or other images for reference during processing so that i dont introduce some bias on what is noise and what is actual detail because it was not at all clear when looking at the initial data. I wonder if i would have just excluded the tidal tail if i were to process the image without knowing it was there in the first place, maybe i would have knowing now how faint it is. Negative from the green channel below where it is just about visible: