IC 2574, Coddington's Nebula, was discovered in 1898 by American astronomer Edwin Foster Coddington. It is a dwarf irregular galaxy located around 12 million light years from Earth, in the constellation Ursa Major. It is an outlying member of the M81 group and shows no interaction with other galaxies. It is actively forming stars with star formation regions ranging from 85 to 500 light years in size [1,2].
The image was taken during a period of high pressure, which gave several clear nights. Being only 60 miles from the Atlantic,our humidity is always high and so seeing is compromised and for an object as faint as Coddington's Nebula the individual lights show only a faint smudge and, in the end, I spent five nights on it.
Processing was also a challenge; generally I run NoiseXTerminator after stretching but when I did this and then applied Curves, colored structures appeared throughout the galaxy. It turned out that applying StarXTereminator first, adjusting the starless and star images and only applying NoiseXTerminator to the recombined image worked better. There's always more to learn.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IC_2574[2]
https://esahubble.org/images/potw1152a/
Comments