NGC4565 The Needle. Beautiful as always (Vitali)

NGC4565 The Needle. Beautiful as always

My favourite galaxy. It seems to me that it does not matter how you image it, it looks magnificent everytime.

It was the first galaxy I've tried to image with the EdgeHD almost two years ago (only 2 hours exposure and seriously out of focus). I still use this first image as my avatar.

Apparently the Needle is very similar to the Milky Way in size and appearance and our galaxy would look like this if seen from the same angle.

I've tried to show both the bright core, which shines through the central bulge, and the dim halo above and below the galaxy disc.

This image consists of 984 unguided exposures 120 seconds each. I've gathered the data during the last two new moon periods in March and April.

I have to take a lot of images because the light pollution is rather strong here (center of a small town). I would estimate the sky conditions between Bortle 6 and 5.

Pixinsight Photometric Color Calibration process has been used for this image. Sharpening was done with Multiscale Linear Transfer.

Revision B is the same image without any sharpening or noise reduction. Only stretch and color saturation has been applied.

Thanks for looking!

Vitali

Links:

NGC4565 in the Celestial Atlas by C. Seligman

Final
Original
B
C
D
E

B

Description: No deconvolution, no sharpening, no noise reduction. Practically raw data :)

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: The best 120 seconds frame, integration result and the final image. Downsampled 4x.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: Reprocessed from scratch with focus on the galaxy rather than galaxy+background. Rotated in PixInsight. I think that such view reveals the galaxy disc a bit. :) Also it makes more obvious that the galaxy is warped.

Uploaded: ...

E

Description: (Over?)saturated version. Usually I'm very conservative with applying color saturation, so this revision is an experiment. 32 hours integration time allows to saturate a bit more. Actually most people I've asked preferred this saturated version.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3459969
PixInsight job	BMSBCH9Y3CH96JJ870H8QAJ10E6LEF4H
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	12h36m19s.304
RA (top/left)	12h37m17s.119
RA (top/right)	12h35m19s.804
RA (bottom/right)	12h35m21s.619
RA (bottom/left)	12h37m18s.706

Dec (center)	+25°57′59″.99
Dec (top/left)	+26°06′46″.14
Dec (top/right)	+26°06′10″.90
Dec (bottom/right)	+25°49′12″.00
Dec (bottom/left)	+25°49′47″.16

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