NGC 1291: Absolutely Interesting When You Reach the Core of ItOTA: CDK24
Camera: QHY 600M
Observatory: Tel;escope Live
Date of Capture: Jan '24
Date of Processing: Feb '24
Exposures:
R: 19 x 900 sec
G: 19 x "
B: 20 x "
L: 14 x "
Total Exposure time: 18 hours (83% of the total captured)
Image Width: 31 arc-minutes
Processing Tools:
1. Commercial: PixInsight, Topaz, Photo Director 365, Radiant Photo
2. Pixinsight Addons: NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator
3. My Scripts: NB_Assistant, AC_Restar, Subframe Weighting Tool (Excel w/ J. Hunt), ColorTweaker
[b] [/b]r
Target Desciption:
A "lenticular galaxy" is an intermediate form between a spiral and an elliptical galaxy. NGC 1291 is classified as a face-on lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies have a flat disk of stars that lacks organized into spiral arms and are depleted in interstellar gas and dust, therefore having limited star-birth capability. But their central bulges can have abundant structures, as this image reveals.
Processing Description:My objective in processing this image was to reveal any structure present in the central bulge. Other images show some of the structures in this and other lenticular galaxies (see insets on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_galaxy). Revealing the details demanded differentiation of subtle contrasts that I would typically ignore and which required multiple tools that could each contribute an increment to that task. (They are listed above.) Emphasizing local contrasts to reveal small-scale structures sacrifices some large-scale contrasts and features…everything has to fit in the [0, 1] brightness interval! The only masking done during processing was to isolate the entire galaxy (not just its core) from the background, and that masking was done sparingly.
Target Statistics:
Distance: 33M ly
Apparent Magnitude: 9.4
Absolute Magnitude: 20.6
Average Surface Magnitude: 23
Apparent Target Span: 5.3E16 km
Pixel Span at Target: 3E13 km
Alex Woronow 
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