Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Camelopardalis (Cam)  ·  Contains:  IC 342
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IC 342 - The "Hidden" Galaxy - RGB+L+Ha, Aaron Freimark
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IC 342 - The "Hidden" Galaxy - RGB+L+Ha

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
IC 342 - The "Hidden" Galaxy - RGB+L+Ha, Aaron Freimark
Powered byPixInsight

IC 342 - The "Hidden" Galaxy - RGB+L+Ha

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Anyone want to move to another galaxy? This is a good candidate: IC 342. To see it from Earth, you need to look through the plane of the Milky Way. All that space dust obscures the view, so IC 342 is sometimes known as the "Hidden Galaxy." The dust also makes it difficult to calculate its distance, but we think it's between 7 and 11 million light years from us.

The dust also makes this a real challenge to process. My image is noisier than I'd like, even though it is a composite of over 300 images. I used five filters for this true-color image: red, green, blue, luminance, and a narrow hydrogen-alpha filter to bring out the red "blobs" in the spiral arms. Those blobs are star-forming nebula within IC 342.

Another cool aspect: if you zoom in, you can see a barred structure even within the galactic core.

1. WeightedBatchProcessing, Subframe Selector, Star Alignment, Local Normalization, Image Integration, Drizzle Integration, Dynamic Crop

2. Dynamic Background Extraction

3. EZ Denoise

4. LinearFit B and G to R

5. ChannelCombination RGB

6. Dynamic Background Extraction (again)

7. Photometric Color Calibration

8. L: Histogram Transformation

9. L: EZ Star Reduction

10. L: Extract Wavelet Layers and save Residual layer

11. Residual: Histogram Transformation

12. Residual: CloneStamp to remove star blobs

13. L: LRGBCombination with RGB

14. LRGB: PixelMath to add Ha to red channel

15. LRGBHa+Residual: Curves Transformation to darken background and desaturate foreground

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