IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy (Kevin Morefield)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Camelopardalis (Cam) · Contains: IC 342

IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy, Kevin Morefield

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IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy

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IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy

There are not many galaxies over 20 x 20 arc-minutes, located well into the northern skies, that have neither a Messier nor an NGC number. I assume this is due to its location on the galactic plane, well hidden in the dust of the Milky Way's spiral arms. Wikipedia states that it would be a naked eye galaxy were it better located. But obscured as it is, it is only Magnitude 9.

The processing challenge here is retaining browned color the dust imparts while still showing the structures of the galaxy. Ha helped that quite a bit. I'd like to look for OIII, but my skies just clouded for a week at least, so for now this is an HaLRGB blend.

To add the Ha, I added the linear Ha data to the Luminance and Red channels. But that produced to pure of a red to accurately represent Ha emissions. To simulate the Hbeta that would be coming from the same structures as the Halpha, I added 25% of the linear Ha data to the Blue channel as well. All of this was done with filemath in CCDStack.

Seeing has fluctuated a lot so I had some good and bad Luminance data. I stacked just the sharpest 1/3 of the Lum in one master and all Lum in another. The sharp master was added to the All Lum master using a luminance mask. This included only the bright parts of the sharp data. That left the shadows to be represented by the less noisy All Lum master.

Noise reduction, unsharp masking, high pass filter, color balance, and saturation were adjusted in PS CC. Star reduction was done in PS using minimum filter and liquefy filters.

Final
Original
B

B

Description: Curves adjustment.

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Status	Advanced failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3085779
PixInsight job	5GY6QREGVKVVUYNHSFG5X2AADVWINL2H
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	PLATE_SOLVING_IMAGE

RA (center)	03h46m48s.36
RA (top/left)	03h51m52s.60
RA (top/right)	03h45m27s.80
RA (bottom/right)	03h41m43s.72
RA (bottom/left)	03h48m06s.45

Dec (center)	+68°05′40″.3
Dec (top/left)	+68°04′49″.1
Dec (top/right)	+68°33′03″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	+68°05′57″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+67°38′15″.7

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IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy

IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy

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IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy

IC 342 | The Hidden Galaxy

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