NGC 4565

[WolfieGlos]

It’s been very cloudy lately in the UK, in the evenings at least, but finally had some clear skies to try out my new scope, so decided to go for the Needle Galaxy.

I started off imaging without a flattener, which gave some nasty corner stars but I didn’t want to lose a night of imaging attaching the flattener (and I couldn’t work it out - thanks to FLO for pointing out I was undoing the wrong screws!), so I kept going and kept those 30 frames in the stack. Then I had to wait 2 weeks for an opportunity to continue, but this time with the flattener. Much better performance, especially compared to the 72ed I used previously. I removed the stars from the non-flattened stack during processing and then added the new corrected frames after.

Here is the final cropped image, 84 x 300s + flats, biases and a few darks at Iso400. Starfield 102ed + Canon 800da + HEQ5. No filters. Processed in Siril and Gimp. Comments welcome 🙂

Forecast is suggesting clear skies all week here, I’m undecided whether to put more time into this to remove that band of noise around the edge of the galaxy, or use the little astrodark time we have left in the UK and change to another target…

Edited May 15, 2023 by WolfieGlos

[wimvb]

Very nice image. Adding more data would of course allow for a better definition of the galaxies. But remember that to get a significant improvement from what you already have, you need to roughly double the integration time.

[tomato]

Great image, as you say more subs will improve the noise. You can always revisit the target next season and add data to get more integration time that way. Staying on the same target for 6 weeks or more can be a bit soul destroying, but that is often what is required in the cloudy UK.

[WolfieGlos]

Thanks @wimvb and @tomato 🙂

Good point about doubling the integration, with the current Astro times that would be about a weeks worth of imaging, and I don't really see that it would be worth it, other than perhaps a few of the fainter PGC galaxies around the area. Perhaps tomato has a good idea, waiting until next season. I did manage to capture 4 hours on M63 one night when the Needle was under partial cloud, so perhaps I'll focus my efforts on that one 🙂