Portion of Markarian's Chain and the Eyes (Aaron Freimark)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Virgo (Vir) · Contains: IC 3349 · IC 3363 · IC 3386 · IC 3388 · IC 3393 · NGC 4407 · NGC 4413 · NGC 4425 · NGC 4431 · NGC 4435 · NGC 4436 · NGC 4438 · NGC 4440 · NGC 4458 · NGC 4461 · The Eyes

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Portion of Markarian's Chain and the Eyes

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Portion of Markarian's Chain and the Eyes

I love this potion of the sky, since we can see such a variety of galaxies in a single view. And in between those galaxies, more galaxies. Over a trillion stars.

I captured only a portion of the Chain, cropping out the largest M84 and M86. This way, I hoped to bring more attention to the lovely, smaller objects.

I captured over two nights this week, from my driveway as usual.

Preprocessing
1. WeightedBatchProcessing
2. Create preview around galaxy
3. DrizzleIntegration with Region of Interest to crop to preview
4. Dynamic Background Extraction on R, G, B, L

L
1. EZ Decon, editing the star mask with the Clone Stamp tool to clean up some defects
2. EZ Denoise
3. Histogram Transformation to stretch
4. StarXTerminator to remove stars to another image
5. Range Mask to select bright galaxy cores
6. Histogram Transformation to reduce core brightness
7. PixelMath to replace stars, using “L_stars + $T”

RGB
1. LinearFit R & G to B
2. ChannelCombination
3. ImageSolver script
4. Photometric Color Calibration
5. EZ Soft Stretch
6. Convolution to 3.9 StdDev
7. LRGB Combination to apply L, with 0.3 saturation
8. Repeat LRGB Combination, with Color Noise Reduction
9. CurvesTransformation
10. Apply star_mask from EZ Denoise
11. Unsharp Mask to sharpen galaxies while avoiding stars
12. Export to TIFF and process in Topaz DeNoise AI
13. Return to PixInsight and run EZ Star Reduce, and save as a separate file
14. Open both DeNoise and star reduced images in photoshop, with star reduced on the top later
15. Use erase tool to “punch out” some stars to expose the larger, non-reduced stars in the original (this gives a slight 3D effect)
16. Save as TIFF and high-quality JPEG

Northeast Imagers
Mid-Hudson Astronomical Association (MHAA)

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5699501
PixInsight job	X12X4G9I47RB4VC7WEJ1APC02SEHZA2M
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h27m37s.304
RA (top/left)	12h27m59s.999
RA (top/right)	12h29m22s.614
RA (bottom/right)	12h27m14s.135
RA (bottom/left)	12h25m52s.440

Dec (center)	+12°48′58″.92
Dec (top/left)	+12°08′53″.96
Dec (top/right)	+13°20′06″.49
Dec (bottom/right)	+13°28′55″.87
Dec (bottom/left)	+12°17′38″.82

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Portion of Markarian's Chain and the Eyes

Portion of Markarian's Chain and the Eyes

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Portion of Markarian's Chain and the Eyes

Portion of Markarian's Chain and the Eyes

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Acquisition details

Description

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Sky plot

Histogram

In these public groups

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