NGC 6744 | A Milky Way Mimic (Kevin Morefield)

Celestial hemisphere: Southern · Constellation: Pavo (Pav) · Contains: IC 4823 · NGC 6744

Image of the day 10/09/2023

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NGC 6744 | A Milky Way Mimic

Image of the day 10/09/2023

Powered byPixInsight

NGC 6744 | A Milky Way Mimic

Located 30 million light years away in the Virgo Cluster, this intermediate spiral is said to resemble the Milky Way. NGC6744A is the irregular satellite galaxy that appears to be just behind an outer arm of the main galaxy. IC 4823, upper left here, lists as an interacting, lenticular galaxy - I assume it is interacting with NGC 6744 though I don't see a direct, material connection in this data. See Wei-Hao's comment below. 4823 is 11X more distant so not interacting with 6744.

6744 is quite large. In my image the clear extent of the spiral arms spans 23 arc minutes. Even limiting things to the main bright spiral it measures about 16 arc minutes.

Data collection and processing were pretty straight-forward. At 30 million ly, red shift is limited enough that the Ha emission is still well within the bounds of my 5nm Ha filter. So I captured 6.3 hours of Ha which was continuum subtracted and added to the Luminance and Red channels. I also added 10% of the cleaned Ha to the Blue channel to keep the hue a magenta rather than pure red. As the data were collected during our months of poor seeing it took quite a lot of nights to capture. Usable data was capture on 24 different nights from May through September. Countless other nights would have seen data tossed out entirely. My cut-off for Luminance was generally 2.0" and the RGB channels 2.1". Even with so much time I only managed 40 usable Blue subs though I was targeting 60. Patience is one of the luxuries enabled by remote imaging. Even so, patience gets tested...

All whining aside, this object is a beauty and very rewarding. Hope you like it!

Original
B
Final
C

C

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8534784
PixInsight job	YV7TMACKOA2089BN157IYIIXIPY6DHYS
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	19h09m53s.850
RA (top/left)	19h13m01s.869
RA (top/right)	19h09m53s.456
RA (bottom/right)	19h06m47s.617
RA (bottom/left)	19h09m54s.640

Dec (center)	-63°52′36″.87
Dec (top/left)	-64°00′47″.92
Dec (top/right)	-63°30′23″.30
Dec (bottom/right)	-63°44′09″.97
Dec (bottom/left)	-64°14′49″.10

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Image of the day 10/09/2023

NGC 6744 | A Milky Way Mimic

Image of the day 10/09/2023

NGC 6744 | A Milky Way Mimic

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Image of the day 10/09/2023

NGC 6744 | A Milky Way Mimic

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NGC 6744 | A Milky Way Mimic

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