Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Pisces (Psc)  ·  Contains:  M 74  ·  NGC 628
M74 The Phantom Galaxy, Michael Feigenbaum
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M74 The Phantom Galaxy

M74 The Phantom Galaxy, Michael Feigenbaum
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M74 The Phantom Galaxy

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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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M74 The Phantom Galaxy, Michael Feigenbaum