Although it may seem that I must have a thing for NGC 2903 it is really just a coincidence that I am imaging it once again. Don't get me wrong it is a lovely barred spiral galaxy about 20 million light-years distant and popular among amateur astronomers as it is easy to find. Being in the constellation Leo, near the top of the lion's head it is in the perfect spot for me to image from my shed - that was reason one. The second reason for imaging this galaxy is that I wanted to do a comparison with the raw images from this year with using only the field flatter to that of the previous years when I used the focal reducer. Although it won't be a perfect comparison (imaging conditions and focusing differences) I wanted to see if there will be a noticeable difference.
Link to the results:
Comparison - With and Without a Focal ReducerOddly enough, none of my images resemble each other as I highlighted different aspects when processing them each year. This time around, for better or worse, I wanted to try something different so I highlighted the color. NGC 2903 is unique in that exhibits an exceptional rate of star formation activity near its center. The size of this galaxy is just a little smaller than our own Milky Way at about 80,000 light-years across making it a good twin of us (source: APOD). If you have a good eye there is a small 'little fuzzy' next to NGC 2903, this is PGC 27115 - UGC 5086, Stellarium has it listed as an active magnitude 18.00 galaxy. I like how the stars and background came out as well. On Astrobin I have put up the Wide field image as a link below as there were plenty of other faint fuzzies in the background, in particular on the right side of the image. However, I added the rotated and cropped version as the galaxy is oriented in a more typical side to side view. I spent a little time really learning a different noise reduction method in PI (MLT) which produced much better results from the get-go. Thanks to Gary Imm - the Oracle of Noise Reduction for pointing me in new directions for NR.
Link to Wide Field Image:
NGC 2903 Widefield
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