NGC 55 String of Pearls Galaxy

User images created with StarTools.
Post Reply
Startrek
Posts: 351
Joined: Mon Dec 30, 2019 3:49 am

NGC 55 String of Pearls Galaxy

Post by Startrek »

Took the opportunity to capture NGC 55 under my Bortle 8 City suburban skies as we had consecutive clear nights with no moon around. I’ve captured this Galaxy before but under rural Bortle 3 dark skies from my Dome.

6” f6 GSO newt
Skywatcher EQ6-R pro mount
ZWO 2600MC cooled to -10C Gain 100
No filters ( just internal UV / IR cut protective window
TS Optics GPU coma corrector
PHD2 Multistar guiding ( 0.55 to 0.65 arc sec total )
185 x 90 sec dithered guided subs
40 x Flats
60 x Bias
EQMOD, Stellarium, APT
Stacked in DSS
Processed in Startools V1.8 OSC linear data set

Loaded stacked imaged into Startools and Wow had some heavy gradient to deal with , almost a white out
I bumped up Wipe to 85%

Managed to process some sort of image out the turmoil of heavy LP gradient

I was quite surprised as SV Decon worked ok , even with a 40% Bin to reduce noise but sacrifice a lot of resolution
I did have to reduce iterations from 10 down to 8
Quite peculiar as I’ve Binned other images before and SV Decon ended up with my Stars having speckled light and dark pixels.
Another observation I made was that being a OSC broadband image I had so many more Stars with green cores to use as samples ( I think I used 14 of 16 ) The previous OSC NB images I used an L Extreme or Antlia filter and had trouble finding Stars with green cores , only a handful
Anyway SV Decon did work with a heavily Binned image ( 40% )

Comments welcome
Thanks
Attachments
6E979471-A41B-4065-8BD4-9ADD421A315D.jpeg
6E979471-A41B-4065-8BD4-9ADD421A315D.jpeg (233.94 KiB) Viewed 813 times
fmeireso
Posts: 367
Joined: Mon Sep 28, 2020 8:46 pm
Location: Belgium

Re: NGC 55 String of Pearls Galaxy

Post by fmeireso »

Came out quite nice! Especially if you take bortle 8 skies in consideration..
Post Reply