I got drawn to this galaxy pair because of the name of the Whale galaxy. I love marine life and plan to image the rest of the marine life named objects in the future. It ended up being a perfect mid-night target while waiting on targets to rise in the early morning.
Initially, I couldn’t see the whale in the whale galaxy but as I imaged it, I could start imagining it. The Whale on the bottom right contains lots of dusty lanes and nodules in the edge on view of the galaxy. The Hockey stick on the top left is a peculiar distorted edge on galaxy. It is richly blue and one end has an upturned edge and a faint star stream that continues in the same shape of the undistorted disk.
In this edit, I focused on the galaxies themselves over the tidal streams. At the moment, I didn’t like the amount of noise I was introducing when bringing out the faint tidal streams. This could be a limitation of my skies but is more likely to be a limitation in my usage of masks in PixInsight. Zoomed out and in the negative they are noticeable.
Processing steps:
- Stack in ASTAP
- Bring to PixInsight
- DynamicCrop
- GradientCorrection
- ImageSolver
- SPCC
- BXT Default settings
- NXT 0.6 noise, default detail
- GHS then Linear black point adjustment
- RangeSelection the galaxies
- Curves increase saturation
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