Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Corvus (Crv)  ·  Contains:  Antennae  ·  Antennae Galaxies  ·  NGC 4038  ·  NGC 4039
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017, David Dearden
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017, David Dearden
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

This target is challenging from my location as it transits at an elevation of only 31° and doesn't stay above the horizon very long, but I decided to give it a shot because I thought I could probably do better than last year's effort and it's a lot of fun to try and image the tidal tails. Everything was working about as well as could be expected, but I did miscalculate what time the target would set so I got only 6 R subs, many fewer than I was aiming for, and in general I struggled from not having quite enough data. The L data were noisier than expected. I may want to try either using a bit longer subs or going back to unity gain. But I do think this is better than I got last year.

Date: 21 Apr 2017

Subject: NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies

Scope: AT8IN + High Point Scientific coma corrector

Filters: ZWO 31 mm diameter unmounted L, R, G, B

Mount: EQ-6 (EQMOD 2.000j)+PEC

Guiding: Orion Thin Off-axis Guider + DSI +PHD 2.6.3.2 (Win 10 ASCOM) using predictive PEC algorithm

Camera: ASI1600MM-Cool, -20 °C, Gain 0 Offset 10

Acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro 2.6.0.21

Exposure: 50x180 L, 6x180 R, 15x180 G, 15x180 B

Stacking: Neb 4.1.5, flats & darks, trans+rot align, Nebulosity 1.5σ stack and align.

Processing: StarTools 1.4.327. Stretched and deconvoluted the luminance. Combined RGB in Neb 4 and stretched, color balanced, and sharpened in StarTools. Layered luminance over RGB in Photoshop CC 2014, used Carboni’s Astronomy Tools deep space noise reduction several times, boosted the vibrance a lot and saturation almost as much, used fairly aggressive unsharp mask to make up for less aggressive deconvolution in StarTools, topped off with AstroFrame.

Comments

Revisions

    NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017, David Dearden
    Original
    NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017, David Dearden
    B
  • Final
    NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017, David Dearden
    C

B

Description: Boosted the R channel 15% to make up for lack of data, which of course introduced some R noise, so I darkened a bit to compensate.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: Used layer-masked curves to bring back the tidal tails a bit.

Uploaded: ...

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

NGC 4038/4039, Antennae Galaxies, LRGB, 21 Apr 2017, David Dearden

In these public groups

ZWO ASI1600MM/QHY163M