One of my favourites, M81 Bode's Galaxy in Ursa Major. The dwarf galaxy Holmberg IX is faintly visible on the left of the image. I hope to add more to this as a long term project.
My first full HaRGB image taken with a mono camera. To save time I didn't take any luminance, instead using Pixelmath to generate a synthetic luminance from the RGB data. This really helped in the processing and resulted in very low noise levels! I wonder if real luminance has this nice side effect? I also decided to leave the full star field in as it was so clean.
Using Aladin, I've identified some very distant objects, including a couple of Quasars whose light has taken about 9 billion years to reach us. Even the two tiny bright galaxies on the left and right of the image are billions of light years away! The faintest objects I have been able to identify so far are between magnitude 21.5 to 22.
If anyone spots it, the interesting object that looks like a comet just below Holmberg IX is actually a galaxy!
Comments