Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Pavo (Pav)  ·  Contains:  IC 4970  ·  IC 4971  ·  IC 4972  ·  IC 4981  ·  NGC 6872  ·  NGC 6876  ·  NGC 6877  ·  NGC 6880
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NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill
NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill

NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill
NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill

NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy

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Description

Note I conducted a substantial rework of the processing for this image. See details below.

NGC 6872 is quite well placed for my location in the Southern Hemisphere, with the Dec of -71° with respect to my 33S latitude, giving a maximum altitude of 52°.

Courtesy of Wikipedia...."NGC 6872, also known as the Condor Galaxy, is a large barred spiral galaxy of type SB(s)b pec in the constellation Pavo. It is 212 million light-years from Earth. NGC 6872 is interacting with the lenticular galaxy IC 4970, which is less than one twelfth as large. The galaxy has two elongated arms with a diameter of over 522,000 light-years making it the largest known spiral galaxy. It was discovered on 27 June 1835 by English astronomer John Herschel."

I captured a few hours of Ha, but this was undifferentiated in any of the galaxies in the image, so I went with straight LRGB. This whole field of galaxies in Pavo is just amazing. The final image is a cropped version of the original capture, to show the detail of the inner cluster of galaxies, including the Condor Galaxy. The full sized version is shown in Version C as a mouse-over. As you can see, despite the massive size of NGC 6872, its great distance means that it has still quite a small apparent diameter. However, I was really pleased with the resolution of fine detail in the galaxy and the colours that came through. Deconvolution with BlurXTerminator improved the clarity of the resolved detail remarkably well. The core has a satisfying yellow brown colour, whilst the elongated and distorted spiral arms show the intense blue of star formation, probably engendered by the gravitational effects of the interaction with IC 4970. It was nice to see the extent of the disruption to these extended spiral arms and the tendrils of star streams emanating from it.

The reported image scale was affected by the resizing and is actually 0.67 arc secs per pixel.

During the processing of the image I became aware of a milkiness and structure in the background and it appeared quite blotchy. At first I thought this was perhaps an arefact of denoising or something. I checked out a number of images on AstroBin and discovered that many of them also recorded this IFN/ galactic cirrus and one showed blotchiness. I had convinced myself that the blotchy structure reflected the nature of the IFN. However,  @Gary Imm made the observation that he had not seen this sort of thing before and given the vast number of images he has taken and the large area of the sky he has imaged, I decided that it was more likely that these blotches were an artefact. He also showed me that images taken from large professional scopes don't show the blotchiness at all, although they are generally centred around NGC 6872. However, the nebula apparent in other images still suggested to me that the galactic cirrus is real.

And so I began to investigate where the issue had arisen. I showed that none of the various processes post calibration created the issue and that it appeared to be in the calibrated lights. I began wondering if the issue was due to the age of my Darks. I had last done Darks in January and I was aware that I had gone longer than my normal 3 month interval. Equally I had seen some column defects that had not calibrated out and required treatment with a defect list in Cosmetic Correction within PixInsight. Last night I ran new darks and calibrated the lights with these today. Sure enough the blotchiness was hugely reduced when the subs were calibrated with up to date Darks. Revision I shows a comparison of the MasterStack RGB, at the linear stage and autostretched, after RGB Combination, Colour Calibration BlurXTerminator and NoiseXTerminator. The left image calibrated with the older darks is substantially more uneven/ blotchy than the version calibrated with the newer darks. Most of the column defects now calibrated out and did not require Cosmetic Correction. 

My theory is that, with time, the pixels in the sensor change and some exhibit more or less dark current noise. Across the sensor I imagine this to be quite variable. When we take darks and integrate a multiple of them to create a MasterDark, we are mapping the highs and lows of the sensor landscape, with respect to dark current noise. Then when we take our Lights, the hills and valleys of the dark current noise closely match those of the MasterDark and are accurately subtracted during calibration. However, as the time goes by, there is some drift in the dark current noise and the hills and valleys no longer match up perfectly. It is not difficult to understand that where hills become dales, and vica versa there can be a significant change in the reported brightness after calibration. This is probably exacerbated with IFN because it brings out the differences but is not so bright as to drown them out. In fact, whilst the recalibration with up to date darks made a huge difference, I also employed Jon Rista's MMT Denoising routine at the linear stage because it helps with blotchiness. Further I used Warren Keller's PixelMath formula iif($T<0.1,$T+0.5*(median($T)-$T),$T) to further reduce the variation in the background. I experimented with the pixel value below which to apply the formula and found that 0.1 got all the background but didn't affect the galaxies. I applied this to the starless image and it had a nice effect. I hope you agree that the rework is a vast improvement. 

I cropped right in to allow the detail in NGC 6872 to be clearly seen and this is shown in Revision G.

Finally, Revision H is an annotated version of the entire FOV, where the other major galaxies and other structures in the image are detailed.

Comments

Revisions

  • NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill
    Original
  • NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill
    G
  • NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill
    H
  • NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill
    I

G

Description: Full FOV

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H

Description: Annotated FOV

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I

Description: Linear MasterStack RGB up to denoising, with old darks and new darks

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NGC 6872 - the Condor Galaxy, Niall MacNeill