Arp 271 consists of two distant spiral galaxies, NGC 5426 & NGC 5427) that are interacting and gravitationally linked. The galaxies are located a whopping 130 Million light years from earth and both galaxies are of a similar size. They have been interacting for millions of years and they wil continue to for millions more. It is not known weather they will collide or not. But we do know that the mutual gravitational attraction has created "bridges" of stars, gas and dust between the them.

This is a small and faint object and not the best for my telescope, which is optimized for larger scale objects, but I wanted to try something that was challenging. Another thing that made this difficult was the fact that it is located fairly low in the south\ern sky and is already at the meridian (the highest point it will reach in the night sky) when twilight ends. That gives me about an hour for exposure before it is cut off by the trees on the west side of my driveway.

The results after one night of capture was disappointing. Way too much noise and too little signal. Because it was low in the southern sky also means that I am looking obliquely through as much of the atmosphere that I can - which also hurts results. So I captured two nights of data (this is first for me) and then stacked the results to get this. I still had signal-to-noise issues, so I tried applying the Topaz Noise AI tool to it, using it's special dark scene mode and it it did an amazing job cleaning things up.

So - not the best image, but an interesting challenge for me…

This image resulted from 54 x 120 second captures taken on 6-11-20 and 6-15-20.. Captured with a William Optics 132 mm FLT APO scope on an IOptron CEM60 mount. Camera was a ZWO ASI294MC-Pro. Capture was done using Sequence Generator Pro and PHD2 Guiding. 35 Darks, 45 flats, and 45 bias frames taken for each night's session. Processing was with DeepSky Stacker, Pixinsight, Photoshop, and Topaz Denoise AI.