NGC 404 - Mirach's Ghost (Kurt Zeppetello)

NGC 404 - Mirach's Ghost

Link: http://astroquest1.blogspot.com/

I was not planning to image Mirach and the Ghost (NGC 404) as I just needed a bright star to carefully check how far off or how close each filter's focus is from one another. I assumed they were all par focal since they were same brand but I had my doubts. I recently shot the Bubble in Ha and then the following night in OIII. On the second night I checked the focus in luminosity. The night was wasted, after stacking, it was clear the focus was way off. After some research and AB communication with Gary Imm I discovered there is no real such thing as par focal. I don't have a fancy electronic focuser that takes care of offsets so I thought I would see if I could make a chart and do it manually. That really did not work however I did get much better at focusing and discovered that the LRGB and Ha are very close, beyond detection, however, the OIII and SII were different. From now on I will carefully check each filter in particular the narrowband filters. I re-imaged the Bubble in OIII last night and although I did not stack them, the individual subframes were far sharper than I have seen in my previous OIII images.

The Ghost is a dwarf lenticular galaxy, similar to the Small Magellanic Cloud. Astronomers suspect one or several mergers with smaller galaxies roughly 1 billion years ago caused star formation and that NGC 404 is a former spiral galaxy that was transformed into a lenticular one by those events.

In my image NGC is to the lower left within Mirach's shine. I did not crop it much as I liked the star field and this was more of a test anyway. Several blue and yellow stars are scattered throughout the image. Mirach or Beta Andromedae is a red giant 197 light-years from Earth and has an apparent magnitude of 2.05 - perfect for focusing practice.

Imaged with APT
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2392592
PixInsight job	B7IZYMM5K45GG8VC7UO6KZUCBIOZETXU
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	01h09m44s.18
RA (top/left)	01h06m15s.19
RA (top/right)	01h15m07s.30
RA (bottom/right)	01h13m18s.10
RA (bottom/left)	01h04m18s.29

Dec (center)	+35°37′28″.4
Dec (top/left)	+34°42′19″.9
Dec (top/right)	+35°14′13″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+36°32′14″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	+35°59′49″.2

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