Arp 273 The Cosmic Rose

[tomato]

Inspired by the absolutely stunning HST image of these interacting galaxies that appeared on the August page of my astronomy calendar, I thought I would give it a go. This is just under 20 hrs of data made up of 640 mins Lum with the ASI178/Esprit 150, 100 mins each R, G, B with the ASI178/Esprit 150 and 258 mins with my new ASI678 OSC/Esprit 150. The idea was to see if I could capture RGB more easily with the ASI678 but the stack had terrible walking noise which is difficult to eradicate with dither on a dual rig. This was resampled x3 to bring it closer in line with the binned mono data.  

Calibrated and stacked in APP, channels combined in APP then processed in PI and Affinity Photo.

I have noticed that some intrepid imagers here on SGL have done blink comparison gifs with their final image and the HST equivalent, which compare very well IMHO. However, if you look up the HST image of the Rose, you will see why I won't be doing that any time soon.😪

Thanks for looking.

 

[geeklee]

Fantastic @tomato Looks really clear, with well defined details and good colour as well.

[carastro]

Excellent result.

Edited September 24, 2023 by carastro

[tomato]

Thanks for the positive feedback. I confess I was a little disappointed with the end result given 20 hrs of integration  but my OSC data was poor and difficult to  process and of course by comparing it to the HST image I have set the bar rather high.

There are so many interesting Arp targets but the majority are unfortunately rather small.

[WolfieGlos]

44 minutes ago, tomato said:

I confess I was a little disappointed with the end result given 20 hrs of integration

Well you could always get another 20 hours 😉

This is the third time I’ve been here to look at the image…it’s great, and one not often seen if at all, and you have good details in the spirals. Thanks for sharing.

Was this cropped from a larger FOV? 

[geeklee]

1 hour ago, tomato said:

but my OSC data was poor and difficult to  process and of course by comparing it to the HST image I have set the bar rather high.

It sounded like a challenge to bring all the data together (even more impressive) and pulling up an HST image as comparison is always going to give you second thoughts! ☺️

[Paul M]

That's brilliant. I don't think I've been introduced to this Arp previously.

My own experience with Arp objects hasn't been so good!

[tomato]

20 minutes ago, WolfieGlos said:

Well you could always get another 20 hours 😉

Was this cropped from a larger FOV? 

Sort of. A lot of the imaging was done unattended and when passing cloud interrupted the sequence and then restarted the object had strayed from the centre, so there was a lot of overlapping subs. I also had to crop the OSC data severely to get rid of the walking noise ‘frayed edges’. I would have preferred a wider field of view TBH. I also rotated the image through 90 degrees to put the rose upright.

[Dan_Paris]

Lot of details in one of my favorite galactic pair, well done!