NGC 891 (Tom Gray)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Andromeda (And) · Contains: HD14437 · HD14771 · NGC 891 · NGC 898

NGC 891

Not my finest image - slight elongation of the starfield has smeared the fine detail, and my framing has cut off the rather nice galaxy cluster, AGC 347 top left in my image. Nevertheless, the focus of the image is on the edge-on barred spiral galaxy NGC 891, lying 30 mLY from earth and showing a disk, containing 500 billion stars and 100,000 LY in diameter. There are numerous foreground stars peppering the disk, and a couple of faint background galaxies peeping through the halo. Perhaps the most interesting feature is the strong dust lane, bisecting the disk, which shows numerous filaments, thought to be the result of supernovae in the galaxy arms. The stronger filaments can be seen in the mouseover. I may have missed the lovely spiral NGC 906, but there are plenty of background galaxies to explore.

Seeing was not particularly steady, so I limited exposures to 180s, to capture sufficient light in my small 80mm semi-APO refractor. Mounted on my little Star Adventurer, I had difficulty maintaining a good balance and polar alignment over the course of the night. This image is the full stack of 120 exposures (6 hours integration) calibrated in Nebulosity and processed in Startools. Revision C is the best 60% of frames, pre-processed in ASTAP.

Final
Original
B
C

B

Title: Cropped and enlarged

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Pre-processed in ASTAP

Description: The best 60% (74 x 120s) exposures pre-processed in ASTAP - slightly sharper, and less background noise

Uploaded: ...

Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
UK Astro-Imaging

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6339825
PixInsight job	11CE4O78X04JI0WX9GAHPOGQYNQ7SEPA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	02h22m46s.55
RA (top/left)	02h24m55s.72
RA (top/right)	02h25m17s.93
RA (bottom/right)	02h20m34s.52
RA (bottom/left)	02h20m18s.20

Dec (center)	+42°25′31″.7
Dec (top/left)	+41°47′00″.6
Dec (top/right)	+43°01′21″.3
Dec (bottom/right)	+43°03′53″.5
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°49′28″.9

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