I had a bit of struggle during the last weeks (and the weather wasn't helping). I wanted to switch to off-axis-guiding to get some weight off my HEQ5. But besides the fact that getting in to focus was rather fiddly... i couldn't get good guiding (or even a good calibration). So Instead I got a mono guidecam and switched back to my good old scope. Therefore, this night was rather a test of my guiding... which left me about 5 hours of clear sky to catch some photons.
With NGC2403, I picked my first "smaller" galaxy and I was curious what it will look like with only 1000mm. Also the moon was already 80%, so my hopes weren't too high. But after I saw the first frame I was surprised. On the one hand by the details i still got an on the other hand by it's beauty and similarity to M33. So I set up the sequencer and actually got a night of real good guiding (finally
). I chose 240s sub-frames with 100 gain. Even if this is not a big project, I still like the outcome of that night
The object itself is sometimes called "little M33"
It has a diameter of ~70.000 ly, is approximately 10 million ly distant and is containing numerous star forming regions. One of such regions (NGC2404) is actually 1,000 ly wide and therefore, among the biggest known H-II regions!
Also interesting: The small galaxy in the top of the image is called "UGC 3898" and it's 300 million lightyears distant
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