NGC 1313 Spinning Out of Control? (Alex Woronow)

NGC 1313 Spinning Out of Control?

NGC 1313 Spinning Out of Control?

OTA: 12.5” f/9 Quasar (Insight Observatory) Chile
Camera: SBIG STL11000
EXPOSURES: 7.7 hours

Image Width: 32 arc-minutes
Processed by Alex Woronow (2022) using PixInsight, Topaz, StarXTerminator, SWT

According to Wikipedia, this galaxy has patches of star-burst activity and does not appear to rotate around its apparent optical center. Not mentioned or visible in the picture on Wikipedia is an extended irregular darkish cloud. Perhaps the cloud is gas and dust with the sparsity of stars increasing radially. All these observations are consistent with a recent interaction with another galaxy, although no candidate for the interaction appears in its vicinity.

With this f/9 12.5” scope, the stars were rather large. StarXTerminator did a reasonable job of removing them but left the larger ones with damage that carried through to the final image. SXT did a reasonable job of removing the stars lying in front of the galaxy. That was important.

Image B is a very simple LRGB image with absolutely no post-processing after combining the filter stacks and trimming the left-hand tail from the histogram. I present it here to answer a question I’ve been asked a couple of times: “What would your images look like if processed “normally?” If doing almost no post-processing is normal (and I don’t know whether it is or not), then Image B may answer that question. Granted, I blink and reject, as well as custom weight, my raw subs rather aggressively. But those actions pay off largely late in the post-processing when going deep for detail.

Regardless…I find it remarkable what level of detail modern imaging rigs can reveal if the image processor so desires.

Hope you enjoy,
Alex

Final
Original
B

B

Title: Virtually no processing past stack-'n-stretch

Description: See description for what this is and why it's here

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5757389
PixInsight job	ON8V54QU8UBE92VM7P1EL1TZWHZIBQQ0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h18m38s.50
RA (top/left)	03h20m47s.30
RA (top/right)	03h20m59s.22
RA (bottom/right)	03h16m26s.76
RA (bottom/left)	03h16m20s.65

Dec (center)	-66°31′37″.4
Dec (top/left)	-66°15′05″.6
Dec (top/right)	-66°47′17″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	-66°48′04″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	-66°15′49″.6

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