This iconic galaxy was on my Namibia target list. When not from here, from where then, were my thoughts. To my surprise it was smaler but brighter than I expected in the first centering frame. Ok...let's make the best out of it. So I optimized my collimation and then searched for the optimum focus position after recentering. M 104 was near to optimum position now and seeing condition seemed excellent. After enlarging the next shot, I could already see structures in the dust belt. Wow...
With the lowest possible gain, 4min exposures were necessary to get that phantastic halo. In two nights I managed to get 80 subs short before the meridian flip. By stacking in DSS , I decided for only 50% of them for the final picture including the use of the 2x drizzle function. A pre version with only short processing on a sleepy afternoon already in Namibia showed me, that surely I have enough good data for a nice version, but, this was clear, also a lot of processing work. After several hours with pixinsight and photoshop here on my kitchen table back home, this is my final result and I hope you can share my joy about the lot of visible detail, achieved with only 11 inches of aperture. And........it was a great idea to set it on my target list.
Because I was asked about the astrofarm in Namibia, I would like to share a very nice video made by Frank Sackenheim about "Kiripotib". Frank is a nice guy producing an astrofoto cast on youtube which is very successful in the german speaking region over years now. That white haired man on the stairs of the "Hasenschanze" at the end of the video is me, by the way.
https://youtu.be/zwopCIrMysACheers, Christoph
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