Sunday, 28 August 2016

Managed to get some imaging time in last night 27 August 2016.

Target for the night was NGC 253 also known as the Sculptor galaxy.


From Wikipedia:
As one of the brightest galaxies in the sky, the Sculptor Galaxy can be seen through binoculars and is near the star Beta Ceti. It is considered one of the most easily viewed galaxies in the sky after the Andromeda Galaxy.
The Sculptor Galaxy is a good target for observation with a telescope with a 300 mm diameter or larger In such telescopes, it appears as a galaxy with a long, oval bulge and a mottled disc. Although the bulge appears only slightly brighter than the rest of the galaxy, it is fairly extended compared to the disk. In 400 mm scopes and larger, a dark dust lane northwest of the nucleus is visible, and over a dozen faint stars can be seen superimposed on the bulge
I took 400 X 30 second frames on this target.
I then discarded a BUNCH of them and ended up putting 282 into DSS.
DSS then decided to chuck out a few more and it stacked 225.

Short exposure AP.
Light frames 225X30 second exposures.
Dark frames 20
Light frames 10
ISO 800
Skywatcher 102 ALT/AZ mount.
Canon 1200D.(Unmodded)

It is getting considerably warmer here and APT was showing a sensor temp of 33deg to start with and dropping to 30 by the end of the session, this was imaged form 21H30 through midnight.
Fairly high for a DSLR so noise was a major problem in the image, I still have plenty of noise in it as I struggled to reduce it while still keeping a reasonable galaxy.

Here is the result along with a annotated version from Astrometry.net





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