The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
It’s “galaxy season”, meaning there are not a lot of colorful and interesting nebulae in the sky as our view now is not toward the center of the galaxy where stuff like that resides, but out toward emptier space where most of the the objects are distant galaxies. This one (the Whirlpool Galaxy) is about 30 million light-years away and is pulling in its neighbor, NGC5195. (Our own galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across.) My telescope doesn’t have the focal length to go after targets like this but I was pleasantly surprised how much I could resolve, with just average skies and only 2.5 hrs of acquisition in between clouds.
Specific Feedback
All comments welcome! I left the crop a bit loose to show three other galaxies.
Technical Details
167 1-minute subs processed in PixInsight with the new delightfully easy workflow, which took maybe 30 minutes after the automated pre-processing steps to calibrate and stack the frames. Instead of the newest easy stretch to nonlinear, I did the older star removal path which gave better control over detail in the galaxy, stretching both separately before recombining.
This is the first image with my new tracker and it’s a sort of princess and I’m still working to optimize the best guiding settings.
Very cool, Diane. It’s amazing what the software and control systems can do to make astro photography available without a full blown observatory on top of a mountain..
@Diane_Miller, this is a wonderful image! I’m glad that you were able to crop and eliminate the noise, etc. I’m impressed with your knowledge of the solar system and your equipment. Here in the Southern Appalachians, we struggle to get good shots of the Milky Way! For the last couple of years, we’ve had alot of cloud cover in late summer (our best time) and always have alot of ambient light on the horizon.
Thanks, @Susanna_Euston ! Stacking that many images reduces a lot of noise, and a version of that can be done with our normal daytime photography with Photoshop. And there is the most amazing NR software that gets what is left.
Truly dark skies are scarce everywhere this side of 18,000 ft in Chile. And Murphy’s Law says the clearest skies are near the full moon. This deep sky stuff is easier than Milky Ways. We have light pollution from the Bay Area to the south but this was to the north.
Thanks, @Youssef_Ismail ! The galaxy is IC4263, about 140 million light years away. When I do star removal to stretch the object(s) separately, there are usually a handful of tiny galaxies that the software recognizes and leaves. Here’s the plate solve from AstroBin:
Totally! What can be seen with this amateur equipment is minuscule compared to what the Hubble and now the Webb can resolve. Those and other sophisticated observations have shown that galaxies are distributed along vast structures that resemble the walls of soap bubbles. And new theories are coming forward about the earliest stages of the universe. Exciting times!
Thanks, @richard27 ! I’m blown away by what I can capture. It’s definitely a different thing because anybody with similar equipment can do essentially the same, with some leeway in processing. But just to get the feeling of how far you can see is amazing.
And that little galaxy that is 140 million light years away – the light I captured left it 140 million years ago, when dinosaurs were roaming the earth. Who knows what it looks like now…
Frankly I’m unqualified to provide a technical review but I can say I love this image! A large print size of this - in the right place of course - would be stunning!
Thanks, @tom.marin ! I think what I love the most about astrophotography is the beauty of so many of these deep sky objects – a beauty born of violent interactions of the forces of nature, and in incredibly slow-motion from our humble perspective.
@Diane_Miller I’ve always been amazed when I gaze up at the stars that what we are seeing is from millions of years in the past. I think it’s something that many people probably don’t know (or appreciate)!
You’re probably right, @richard27 – most people know the universe is BIG – but they may not appreciate how incomprehensibly big. Some object is so many light years away, but can anyone really comprehend how far a photon of light travels in A YEAR??? Or appreciate that we can now see the universe as it existed so much closer to the Big Bang? (Of course, that’s not close in our time frame…)
