Astral Imaging at Dogwood Ridge Observatory

Latitude: 37°48'51.0" N"
Longitude:78°23'41.0"W
Scottsville, Virginia 24590

(click on thumbnails to go to that image's page)

Quoted from SEDS:

NGC 2683 was discovered by William Herschel on February 5, 1788.

This spiral galaxy is viewed nearly edge-on from our perspective. Because of its appearance, it was nicknamed the "UFO Galaxy" by the Astronaut Memorial Planetarium and Observatory site. Note the small yellowish core in the center of the galaxy, consisting of older stars. Also note the fine details of the spiral structure, traced by dark dust in the brighter part of the disk (particularly well visible in the larger image.

The UFO is receding from us at 410 km/s, and from the Galactic Center at 375 km/s. This indicates that it is probably one of the nearby galaxies, perhaps at about 16 million light years.

• • NGC 2683 image by Michel Peyro and Jean-Philippe Barrilliot, taken with a 600 mm f/3.2 Newtonian
  • Jack Schmidling's NGC 2683 photo, a 30 minute exposure with the MX5 camera through his 16" Telescope (was astrophoto of the week of March 16, 1998)
• SIMBAD Data for NGC 2683
• NED Data for NGC 2683
• Observing Reports for NGC 2683 (IAAC Netastrocatalog) 

This image consists of 19 Red, 20 Green, and 20 Blue images all taken at -30°C at bin 2x2 for 10 minutes each. The luminance images are 15 minutes each binned 1x1 and at -30° with a total of 16 used. All data used totals just over 13.83 hours. All data was acquired using MaxImDl/CCD version 5.24 using ACP7.  Pix Insight version 1.8 was used for processing. Dithered guiding was on.

One item I've noticed about the past few images is the bright star cores being a bit harsh. I've tried to keep from using PS to smudge the cores to the outer regions and haven't found a PI way of doing this. It may be a matter of using a star mask that I haven't tried yet. I'm using a new process in PI, use to be a script, called masked stretch and one thing I've noticed is this affect on the brighter stars. I also seem to have a reflection in the upper left corner that I have yet to discover its origin. It isn't a bright star just off the field so it must be a reflection in my imaging train.