Here is Las Cruces, NM, we had four very good night in a row. I imaged each night for about siix hours. I used Blink in Pixinsight and eliminated quite a few subs. Ultimately I intergrated 20 hours of data. I liked the the result, but wondered how the galaxy would look with only the very best subs. This image is 4 hours RGBH selected from my original 20 hour of good data. Each sub was 2 minnutes in length.
This is the description from Gemini, the Google AI tool:NGC 2403 is an intermediate spiral galaxy located roughly 8 million light-years away in the constellation Camelopardalis. It's nicknamed a "lookalike" to Messier 33 (M33) due to their similar appearance. Both are spiral galaxies with bright central regions, prominent dust lanes, and long, sweeping arms. NGC 2403 is slightly smaller than M33, measuring about 50,000 light-years across.[color=var(--lighterGrey)]NGC 2403 is notable for a few reasons:[/color]
- It's one of the nearest spiral galaxies outside of the Local Group, which is the group of galaxies our Milky Way belongs to.
- It was the first galaxy beyond the Local Group where Cepheid variable stars were identified. Cepheids are pulsating stars that can be used to determine the distance to a galaxy.
- It's home to a giant star-forming region called NGC 2404, which is one of the largest known HII regions. HII regions are clouds of gas and dust where new stars are born.
NGC 2403 is considered a bright enough object (magnitude 8.9) that it can be seen with binoculars under dark skies. However, to see its spiral structure, a larger telescope is needed.
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