So I'm still doing some tuneups and learning on my NYX-101 mount. Was looking for some good targets and I came across IC342 on Telescopius. The size and path across the night sky looked like it should make a great target so I proceeded to plan out the next few days for shooting some subs. So this past Monday I got my first set of 300" subs and loaded them up in PixInsight to see if I was on target or have I made some errors. Grabbed the frames and put them into blink on PI and this is what I see:
Yes, there is NOTHING here. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I'm thinking Whaaaaaaat? I must have the wrong coordinates. Wrong camera settings. Something HAS to be wrong. Nope. I'm spot on. It should be there. Right in the middle in fact. OK. So I just figure go for it and keep shooting. I shot two more nights for a total of 180x300" frames, so lo and behold, there actually is a galaxy here. Doing some reading up then on the galaxy, I now clearly know why they call it the "Hidden Galaxy". It is a very interesting object for sure. I did a process on 75 frames and to be truthful, there is not a whole lot of difference between 75 frames and my image above of 180. I was considering on trying to image over more nights but I think I'm at the point on the curve where any improvement, without some changes, were not going to help. I will have to readdress this target with the same telescope but up in Overgaard where I have bortle 1 skies or shoot it in the Valley with my big glass C14 Edge HD.
This stuff is so cool. I just don't get tired of it.
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