Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope (AstroFckups)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Sculptor (Scl) · Contains: NGC 253 · Sculptor Filament · Silver Coin

Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope, AstroFckups

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Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope

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Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope

Who says you can't image with an f/9 scope?

The Sculptor Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy over 11 million light years from earth, and approximately 90,000 light years in diameter. This is my first galaxy image taken with a focal length of 900mm and focal ratio of f/9, which is very slow for imaging - but Sculptor Galaxy is one of the brighter galaxies in the sky. It's also by far the longest total imaging (~2.8 hours) I've ever done, and it's so worth it for the detail you can see like the dust clouds which feature prominently in the spiral arms of this galaxy.

AstroFckup: the image is not sharp because of backlash and guiding issues - despite my polar alignment being very accurate I had considerable auto guiding errors but decided to proceed with the imaging. Have bought a Rowan Astronomy belt upgrade kit so I hope to get the guiding to sub arcsecond for sharper images in the future.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
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Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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Star trails
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Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
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Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5086124
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope

Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope

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Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope

Sculptor Galaxy - NGC 253 - with an f/9 scope

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