NGC 4945 Galaxy in Centaurus in RGB (and friends) (Ian Parr)

NGC 4945 Galaxy in Centaurus in RGB (and friends)

NGC 4945 is a barred spiral galaxy about 11.7 Million light years away in the constellation of Centaurus with and Apparent visual magnitude of 9.3, visible near the star Xi Centauri.
NGC 4945 one of the brightest galaxies of the Centaurus A/M83 Group, a large, nearby group of galaxies. The galaxy is the second brightest galaxy in the subgroup centered on Centaurus A.
The galaxy was discovered by James Dunlop in 1826 and is thought to be similar to the Milky Way Galaxy, although X-ray observations show that NGC 4945 has an unusual energetic Seyfert 2 nucleus that might house a supermassive black hole.
Around the nucleus of the galaxy, there is a dense disk of dust and gas, along with many dense star clusters.

A couple of rare clear nights before the last quarter moon came up allowed me to leap back into RGB for a nice change fom forced narrow band.

I have stumbled over a new trick (for me anyway) while trying eek out the homunculus in Eta Carina, which may be old news but the results were amazing so I applied it to this 4 degree wide fields image of a one of my favourite galaxy for observing through all aperture scopes.

This image has 29 x 300s Red, 44 x 300s Green and 26 x 300s Blue blended using HDR Composition with 30 x 10s RGB and 30 x 5s RGB.

So now I'm hooked and I have some more objects to finish processing using this technique which I will adpopt going forwards.

It does however require that I intervene during the short exposure runs and drop my usual medium dither per every sub frame to every 5th or 10th or the imaging run would take way to long.

However, the annotated image shows quasars out past 20th magnitude (some quie distinct and some not so much) but not bad with a 71mm refractor under Bortle 4 skies where the UniHedron Sky Quality Meter reported just around 20th magnitude per square arcsecond.

I will also post that annotated image next for the inveterate dumpster divers like me :-)

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9952803
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NGC 4945 Galaxy in Centaurus in RGB (and friends)

NGC 4945 Galaxy in Centaurus in RGB (and friends)

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NGC 4945 Galaxy in Centaurus in RGB (and friends)

NGC 4945 Galaxy in Centaurus in RGB (and friends)

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