NGC 253 - The Sculptor Galaxy (Bob Rucker)

NGC 253 - The Sculptor Galaxy

Last night I headed out to the Picket Post Trailhead for some dark sky imaging with the astro buddies. I decided to image one of my favorite galaxies, NGC 253 since I have no clear view of it from my backyard. Little did I know that this was going to be a long and difficult evening. This target is very low peaking at an altitude of 32 degrees but the average altitude for the session was closer to 23 degrees. With the Sculptor Galaxy skimming over the cacti, I quickly discovered that the legendary guiding of the AM5 mount is not a thing when imaging close to the horizon.

I'm not quick to give up so I improvised my imaging strategy to see if I could collect enough data to get some sort of acceptable result. Short exposures were mixed with long exposures as an experiment to tame noise and allow enough frames to drizzle integrate. All data was stacked for the LRGB galaxy processing. Because of the guiding challenges, RGB stars only utilized 30 second exposures stacking 80% of the frames using the APP star size weighting to try for a semicircular result. BlurXterminator was used as final optimization for the stars.

I'm glad that I was finally able to image this target. This target would probably have a much better result if I could image over many nights when the target was at peak viewing for an hour or so. Given the limitations of my backyard view, I'll settle for my evening out at Picket Post.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Some rainy day entertainment with processing old data. I took a different strategy by doing HDR compositions of the various exposure lengths in place of the previous drizzle integration. The new AI4 for BXT helped improve the stars since my guiding was not the greatest with the target being so low on the horizon. I feel like the new version is a bit better.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8949338
PixInsight job	3L9SIYJ79LIJ8SDQH5B8B5RIUMEHTFD3
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h47m33s.922
RA (top/left)	00h46m35s.990
RA (top/right)	00h49m25s.192
RA (bottom/right)	00h48m32s.435
RA (bottom/left)	00h45m42s.687

Dec (center)	-25°17′34″.13
Dec (top/left)	-25°39′06″.77
Dec (top/right)	-25°20′13″.28
Dec (bottom/right)	-24°55′58″.42
Dec (bottom/left)	-25°14′47″.61

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