M74 - The Phantom Galaxy (Cosgrove's Cosmos (Patrick Cosgrove))

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

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M74 - The Phantom Galaxy

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M74 - The Phantom Galaxy

Messier 74 - the Phantom Galaxy. Also known as NGC 628,M74 is a face-on spiral Galaxy located in the constellation of Pisces and is 32 Million Light Years from Earth. It has two well defined spiral arms and is about 95,000 light years across in size. It has a very low surface brightness, making it the second hardest object on the Messier List to observe visually (the first being M101), thus it's name "The Phantom Galaxy". M74 is also noted for having three Supernova that have been identified: SN202ap, SN2003gd, and SN2013ej. SN2003gb is a type II supernova, with a known luminosity profile -allowing the distance to the galaxy to be determined.

I took 123x150 second subs of this over the nights of November 12th & 14th. Only 102 images were used as others were culled due to high level cirrus clouds.

I ran into some strange noise patterns when processing this image - it turns out these came from a problem with my flat exposures a problem I am still tracking down. This image was processed without flats to eliminate that source of noise.

Here are the details for this image:

100 x 150 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C. (Total integration of 4.2 hours).

45 Bias exposures

25 Dark exposures

Flats not used.

Scope: William Optics 132mm FLT F/7 APO

Guide Scope: Apterna 60mm

Camera: ZWO ASI294MC-Pro

Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini

Focus Motor: Pegasus Astro Focus Cube 2

Field Rotator: Pegasus Astro Falcon

Mount: Ioptron CEM60

Polar Alignment: Ioptron Ipolar integrated alignment cameras

Capture Software: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller

Image Processing: Deepsky Stacker, Pixinsight, Photoshop, Coffee, extensive processing indecision and second guessing, and much swearing…..

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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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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.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4022784
PixInsight job	N1FQVV95TF0WXQV5VUR75SGQZFJXODC9
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	01h36m36s.10
RA (top/left)	01h34m59s.29
RA (top/right)	01h38m25s.35
RA (bottom/right)	01h38m13s.21
RA (bottom/left)	01h34m46s.56

Dec (center)	+15°47′29″.6
Dec (top/left)	+15°28′41″.3
Dec (top/right)	+15°33′10″.2
Dec (bottom/right)	+16°06′15″.3
Dec (bottom/left)	+16°01′45″.9

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M74 - The Phantom Galaxy

M74 - The Phantom Galaxy

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M74 - The Phantom Galaxy

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