Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Pegasus (Peg)  ·  Contains:  NGC 7317  ·  NGC 7318  ·  NGC 7319  ·  NGC 7320  ·  Stephan's Quintet
Stephan's Quintet, Joel Shepherd
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Stephan's Quintet

Stephan's Quintet, Joel Shepherd
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Stephan's Quintet

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Description

Subject: Stephan's Quintet: The blueish galaxy (NGC 7320) is a rather neighborly 39 million light-years away. The other galaxies are roughly 250 million light years distant and are gravitationally bound to each other. Long tendrils of stars have been stripped away from the interacting galaxies and a massive shock wave (visible via x-ray: mine, sadly, is in the shop for repair ;-) is emanating from the two colliding galaxies on the right.

Capture notes: All RGB, with a synthetic luminance. This could really stand more data: even with 90 exposures, with such a dim target there is a lot of noise in the background. A project to resume next year ...

Processing notes: I used PixInsight's new PhotometricColorCalibration for the first time on this, and the results were much better than I could get out of the usual ColorCalibration process. It was a real challenge, though, to stretch the detail out of the galaxies (especially the long star trail) without bloating the stars or pulling up the background noise. Like I said, it could probably benefit from a good stack of real luminance data.

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  • Stephan's Quintet, Joel Shepherd
    Original
  • Final
    Stephan's Quintet, Joel Shepherd
    C

C

Description: Same data, reprocessed in 2019. Main differences from original processing are (A) Used MureDenoise after stacking, which is a big help with overall noise control, (B) Stretched with histogram and curves, which led to less haze around the stars at the cost of slight enlargement of the smaller stars, (C) Sharpening with PI's UnsharpMask, (D) Background smoothing with MultiscaleMedianTransform's adaptive setting. I.e. some of the tricks ... erm ... techniques I've picked up in the last year or so.

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Stephan's Quintet, Joel Shepherd