In the sharpest months of the Southern Summer in 2023, I shot 1316 with the CDK17. I noted then that while Wikipedia lists this galaxy as 12x8 arc-minutes, with the 17 I measured the extent of the dust at 26 arc-minutes. With this image from the F3 DeltaRho I now measure the faintest extent of the dust at 52 arc-minutes. For a galaxy that lies 60 million light years distant that is astonishing. I asked ChatGPT how big this would be and it came back with 907,589 light years. Sounds right to me.
@Ferrante Enriques recent image of this is overlayed with radio data showing plasma being emitted perpendicular to the optical ring here. It's a fascinating image and I suggest you have a look.
https://www.astrobin.com/urws9j/0/Below you can see the difference between the CDK17 vs DeltaRho (cropped) images:
Missing in the CDK image is what appears to be a ring ,one or more quite faint shells, and more loops of dust. The CDK image did have more sharpness in the galaxy cores so I blended that sharp core data with the much deeper F3 DeltaRho data. I'm only reporting the integration time from the DeltaRho since that is what is relevant to the depth of the image.
With the very faint shells and the ring, DBE was key here. I also had to do quite a bit of manual work reducing the bright star haloes to flatten the field. Some haloes remain as they intersected with the dust and I did not want to impose my imagination on where the dust ended. Thus the full extent is somewhat vague in places.
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