This barred spiral is quite a spectacular sight. It has a pair of thin wispy arms that spiral out from a large bright core. The core area has a large yellow halo as well has some darker dust lanes that follow along the direction of the arms. There are quite a number of smaller objects in the frame including more distant clusters and galaxies.
This project was more interesting in terms of seeing than the sunflower galaxy as some days, the seeing hit 7-10 HFD which is absolutely ridiculous. In the end, subframes were trimmed to only include those that were HFD < 5.
I never thought I would end up like this but this target taught me to stop being lazy and properly take my flats. I have very weird aberrations such as those in this screenshot. I'm not sure what causes them but I have been slacking on taking my flats recently so I'll need to continue to always take flats after every session again. None of my other images in the other filters or even the UV/IR cut filter have these weird circles or banding. Only this target across all of the nights. Maybe it's because I'm taking images before astronomical darkness? However, nothing else, even my early morning shots have the weird circles throughout. They also occur across all of the sessions which is even weirder. I'll need to come back with more focal length, more time, and more careful checking for these aberrations.
Processing was rather simple but I had to crush the darker areas to quell the aberrations. The result is that I'll need to revisit this target in the future.
Processing:
- ASTAP Calibrate, blink, and stack with HFD <5 subframes.
- Bring to PixInsight
- DynamicCrop
- GradientCorrection Defaults with auto converge
- ImageSolver
- SPCC Average Spiral Galaxy, Antlia Triband/UVIR Cut
- BXT Default
- NXT 0.60 Denoise, 0.15 Detail
- SXT
- Arcsinh Stretch the stars once
- GHS stretch the galaxy till it appears well
- RangeSelection on the galaxy
- CurveTransformation to increase galaxy saturation
- Invert Mask and quell background using CurveTransformation
- ScreenStars to bring the stars back into the image
Aberrations:
Why are there embossed circles?
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