Just 10 degrees from Polaris lies this beautiful face-on spiral in Cam. NGC 2336 is a mag 11 spiral but its' surface brightness, 14.5 mag per square arcmin, makes it difficult to spot visually and challenging to image. It has an apparent size of 7' x 4' and lies at a distance of 100 MLy. It is classified as a ringed, barred spiral galaxy SBbc and apparently the stars near the centre orbit the galaxy not in circles as do the stars in the outer arms- but instead in "figure eights" and more complicated weave-like patterns along the axis of the bar. There have been supernova explosions reported recently in this galaxy.
This image was obtained using my 10" Orion Optics reflector and MX5C ccd camera. 65 X 60 sec exposures were obtained and subsequent processing was done in AstroArt 3 and NEAT. I have been experimenting with various deconvolution techniques and ddp filtering. An example of each compared with the 'normally' processed image is shown here:
http://new.photobox.co.uk/album/28752760Thanks for looking,
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