Conditions: aquired July 11, 2005 in Barraba, a small town in New South Wales, Australia; no moon, clear sky
Setup: Borg 100ED F6.4, DF-2 focusser, CFW-8 filter wheel, L-R-G-B filters, ST10XE camera, Takahashi EM-10 mount (here's a picture of this setup)
Exposure time: L: 6x600 sec (1x1 binning); R,G,B: 4x180 sec (2x2 binning)
Processing (Mira, MaximDL, Registar, Photoshop): dark subtracted, flat fielded, de-bloomed, registered, median/avr combined, color balanced, DDP, combined as LLRGB, despeckled with dust&scratches, cropped
On my astro-imaging expedition to Australia I focussed on objects below roughly -20deg declination. At nightfall the interacting galaxies NGC4038 and NGC4039 were high in the western sky. Since time was scarce and other targets were beaconing I kept the duration and number of exposures at an absolute minimum, which is quite evident on the somewhat noisy image above. In addition, the angular size of this object is rather small for the short focal length of my instrument.
UPDATED: the image above is a reprocessed version inspired by suggestions of Terry Tuggle, with added suppression of noise in the dark
parts of the image and some sharpening of the galaxy cores. The old image can be seen here.
Here's my main page where you can see more of the pictures I have taken so far.
Comments greatly appreciated! (mikael@leif.org)
