Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Fornax (For)  ·  Contains:  Fornax A  ·  Fornax B  ·  HD20956  ·  HD21208  ·  HD21221  ·  NGC 1310  ·  NGC 1316  ·  NGC 1317
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 1316 | A Tangle of Swirling Dust, Kevin Morefield
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 1316 | A Tangle of Swirling Dust

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 1316 | A Tangle of Swirling Dust, Kevin Morefield
Powered byPixInsight

NGC 1316 | A Tangle of Swirling Dust

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

At 60 million lights years away, NGC 1316 is surprisingly large.  While Wikipedia lists it at 12x8 arc minutes, It measures 26 arc minutes on the long side in my image.  I suspect Wikipedia is only referring to the brightest core of the dust, but the 26 arc minute structure I'm measuring is seen in my 5 minute luminance subs.  Not sure what structures officially define the size of a galaxy but if it appears in such a short exposure I would count it.

Adding to the fun here is the interacting companion NGC 1317, a beautiful tight spiral exhibiting an inner ring glowing with blue stars.  Interestingly, I saw no Ha emission areas in my Ha test subs.  
On the right side we see NGC 1310.  This very blue barred spiral is about 12 million light years behind the larger pair.  It comes in a 2.8 arc minutes in my image.

Key processing steps:

1) Create a SuperLuminance out of the RGB and L masters
2) BXT on the SuperLuminance
3) SXT to remove the stars from the SuperLuminance
4) HDRMT at a large scale to bring the cores down
5) A second HDRMT at a small scale just for the core of 1317.  This was blended in to the prior HDRMT via a mask showing only the core of 1317.
6) RGB color calibrated with the old Color Calibration tool.  SPCC is not finding the database after an update and PCC looked completely off.  
7) ArcSinh on the RGB with a small further histogram stretch aftewards.  
8) SXT to separate the stars
9) Unsharp Mask applied to just 1316 and 1317 to bring out the layers of dust.  Cores and background were masked out.
10) Apply the starless RGB as a color layer over the processed Luminance in Photoshop
11) Add the Stars only data as a Screen layer in Photoshop
12) A very light application of NXT to smooth things out but keep just enough noise (for my taste anyway)

Not mentioned here are LAB space color contrast enhancements, curves adjustments and other things specific to my dataset and its flaws.

Comments

Revisions

    NGC 1316 | A Tangle of Swirling Dust, Kevin Morefield
    Original
  • Final
    NGC 1316 | A Tangle of Swirling Dust, Kevin Morefield
    D

D

Description: Increased definition

Uploaded: ...

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

NGC 1316 | A Tangle of Swirling Dust, Kevin Morefield