M74 The Grand Design (Ian Zedalis)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Pisces (Psc) · Contains: M 74 · NGC 628

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M74 The Grand Design

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M74 The Grand Design

M74 is a 'grand design' spiral galaxy with two distinct arms. It is also one of the dimmest of the Messier objects.

This is the 3rd image I've processed with PixInsight. This one was shot at -15C, I originally took 550 subframes for it. The stars are oversaturated, the periodic error in the mount was bad (~5" RMS probably), and the image clearly shows chromatic aberration on the blue channel. One of these days, I'll probably go back and make another attempt at processing this -- if I had to do it again, I'd limit the eccentricity coefficient in the subframe selector to .64 or something (vs .72 which is what I used above). Unfortunately, that cuts the number of useful images to ~70 for integration.

I posted an earlier version of this, but have since gone back and changed a few things. Most importantly, for the new image I increased the dynamic range during the deconvolution step, and I also used a simple luminance mask rather than a range mask. There's an important lession to be learned about PixInsight: It's amazing how easy it is to turn an mediocre image into complete trash by using a few bad settings.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2478753
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M74 The Grand Design

M74 The Grand Design

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Image Index:

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M74 The Grand Design

M74 The Grand Design

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