M74 The Phantom Galaxy (Michael Feigenbaum)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Pisces (Psc) · Contains: M 74 · NGC 628

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M74 The Phantom Galaxy

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M74 The Phantom Galaxy

Here we have a crack at M74 The Phantom Galaxy in Pisces. This one is a classic face-on grand design spiral lying about 30 million light years away. M74 appears to be just slightly smaller than our Milky Way and contains about 100 billion stars. There are a lot of star forming regions, the origins of which are thought to be because of interactions with neighboring galaxies.

Imaging this was interesting as this is a rather low surface brightness object. My strategy was to do a lot of luminance integration to try to capture as much of the faint stuff as I could and do the RGB to apply the color. I finished it with an evening of Hα integrations to try to highlight the star forming regions in the arms of the galaxy.

Anyway, I was quite pleased with the outcome of this project and have learned a bit more about stretching from the linear which I have come to believe is a lot more important to the final image than I had ever thought. I also tried to be very conservative in the application of the Hα data so as not to overwhelm the image with that and cause it to look unnatural.

I also did not do much in the way of star reduction and I really tried to preserve as much of the background stuff as I could by keeping NR to a minimum. As a result, I think I caught a good number of apparently very distant galaxies that don't show up in the advance plate solving. So that kind made me happy too.

I hope you like this one and as always, comments and criticism welcome!

CS and good health...

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Description: re-process with GHS and continuum subtraction

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5221647
PixInsight job	XHKF82AQHMTH5HYIOT80TYNFD4DI64CF
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	01h36m40s.98
RA (top/left)	01h35m58s.33
RA (top/right)	01h35m45s.70
RA (bottom/right)	01h37m23s.52
RA (bottom/left)	01h37m37s.80

Dec (center)	+15°46′41″.2
Dec (top/left)	+16°06′22″.1
Dec (top/right)	+15°29′02″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	+15°26′59″.9
Dec (bottom/left)	+16°04′19″.7

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