NGC 3718 / ASP 214 & NGC 3729 (Uma) - A first C11-DSO-light of (my) Murphy’s Law Galaxy (C11 EHD)

NGC 3718, also called Arp 214, is a galaxy located approximately 52 million light years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. It is either a lenticular or spiral galaxy. 
NGC 3718 has a warped, s-shape. This may be due to gravitational interaction between it and NGC 3729, another spiral galaxy located 150,000 light-years away
NGC 3718 is a member of the Ursa Major Cluster.

In the past year, I had been struggling to get my C11 EHD fully operational: The CGX-L mount was too heavy to get easily outside, I couldn’t get the mount connected to the ASIAIR Pro, I had trouble finding focus, plate-solving, etc …Only some quick planetary and lunar imaging was attempted, but for DSO, I couldn’t get guiding to work

Last week, I gave up on the CGX-L (only to find out afterwards that the ASIAIR-mount connection problem was solved by using the ASIAIR mini)

I switched the C11 EHD to the CEM70 mount, managed to get into focus with the 2600MC, couldn’t find any guiding star because I was using the ‘small’ ZWO OAG, took apart the image train in the middle of the night in the cold outside air, dropped the OAG prism with just 1mm, and eventually managed to get 2 guiding stars in the small circular FOV of the OAG

All this during a full moon, damp cold air (oh yes, dew heaven), so I noticed afterwards that while I was re-modelling the image train, dew had built up on the corrector plate, as the dew heater was switched off

Anyway, this was the first time I had all of the titbits of the C11 EHD working in unison, framing wasn’t exactly what I had planned for, but I had the scope running for 3 hours on its first DSO object.

Trying to beat Murphy’s Law is a hard thing to do, but at least I got a first result in. A bit crude, too short on time, not exactly crisp, heavily tainted with a huge moonlit damp gradient across the image, suppressed in the processing.

This is definitely not the quality I was hoping for, well below the quality of images that I managed to achieve previously, but as this is my first DSO with the C11, beating all the difficulties, I’m kind of happy with it.

As the mantra goes: all learning is good learning.

NGC3718 / ARP 214
C11 EHD, UVIR, ASI2600MC, CEM70
Photons: 63x 180s = 3h09
20230502
PixInsight, BXT, StarXT, NoiseXT, EZ

Happy to hear your thoughts …