Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Camelopardalis (Cam)  ·  Contains:  IC 342
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
IC 342, Spiral Galaxy in Camelopardalis, flyingairedale
IC 342, Spiral Galaxy in Camelopardalis
Powered byPixInsight

IC 342, Spiral Galaxy in Camelopardalis

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
IC 342, Spiral Galaxy in Camelopardalis, flyingairedale
IC 342, Spiral Galaxy in Camelopardalis
Powered byPixInsight

IC 342, Spiral Galaxy in Camelopardalis

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

IC 342, also Caldwell 5, is a spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis. Only 7-10 million light years away, this should be a very bright galaxy in our night sky but it is difficult to observe due to the dust and stars in an intervening arm of our own galaxy. Thus is was given the nickname the "Hidden Galaxy".

I had not been very interested in pursuing this target due to the difficulty bringing out the galactic details without overwhelming the subject behind foreground stars. I finally felt up to the challenge so went digging in my library of unprocessed data. All I found was limited data from a system that is being infrequently operated lately. While there were 12 frames of 10 minutes each of luminance data, there were only 7, 3, & 4 frames of RGB respectively. So I had to alter several parts of my workflow to produce a satisfactory image. Most challenging was the imbalance in color noise due to the low number of green frames relative to the others. That required some off normal sequencing of noise removal in order to avoid color shifts at points where they weren't expected during processing.

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

IC 342, Spiral Galaxy in Camelopardalis, flyingairedale

In these public groups

Members of Deep Sky West