NGC 660 in Pisces (Michael Feigenbaum)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Pisces (Psc) · Contains: NGC 660

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NGC 660 in Pisces

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NGC 660 in Pisces

We finally have had a little bit of more typical Arizona weather conditions that actually coincided with a favorable time on the lunar calendar. So I took the opportunity to try to do something with this lovely NGC660.

This is a very unique polar ring galaxy located about 45 million ly away. It seems there are several theories of its origin but they all suggest some kind of collision between two galaxies about a billion years ago.

As a result, there is a lot of star formation activity and I wanted to try to capture some of that. I think the blue clusters of stars and the older population of yellow red stars were things that I should try to capture as well.

The subject is rather small at 8.3'x3.2' so I was not sure how much detail I could pull out of this. But as mentioned, we had some pretty good conditions and I was pleased with what I could get with the 9.25" SCT.

Processing this was somewhat difficult because there is a lot going on in the background with a myriad of small, smaller, and smallest distant galaxies as well as a pretty dense starfield. I did do some star reduction using morphological transformation processes in Pixinsight. I spent a lot of time editing the mask for this to try to exclude as many non-stellar objects as I could.

Anyhow, I am reasonably pleased with this one and I hope you like it! Comments and criticism always welcome, clear skies and good health to you all.

Thanks to Elmiko for his help on this one...

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Arizona Astrophotographers
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5278831
PixInsight job	BETL0RXC2HS31FAIDOPQ2GPPXBA31U24
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	01h43m02s.22
RA (top/left)	01h43m59s.40
RA (top/right)	01h42m10s.93
RA (bottom/right)	01h42m05s.20
RA (bottom/left)	01h43m53s.44

Dec (center)	+13°38′43″.4
Dec (top/left)	+13°52′09″.2
Dec (top/right)	+13°53′28″.8
Dec (bottom/right)	+13°25′16″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+13°23′57″.2

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