Tag: Galaxies

Processing the 255 hour M51 collaboration

Image: Full-quality image for free download here: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53102830146_dcf5e6941c_o.png You can view all the details and interesting features of the image on astrobin here: https://www.astrobin.com/7hwtz0/ For a great video on this collaboration, look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkES2ltGSoc For a zoomable image, look here: https://elveteek.ch/en/m51-dsc Processing The processing steps here are a result of an iterative processes where I determined the best methods for this dataset. I processed the entire dataset a total of 7 times, and this was the best result. Background Flattening Multi-scale Gradient Removal was used to remove […]

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NGC 1097 and background galaxies

This was a tough image to process because of how faint the stellar streams are. Nonetheless, I think I did a pretty good job balancing out the brightness of the galaxy with the streams. I also am still fine-tuning my MMT HDR method, which works pretty well to bring out detail. There is a far better and deeper image taken by Mike Selby here: https://throughlightandtime.com/ngc_1097_lrgb_ha-rev-3_cdk_1000_2-may-2023/ Spiral galaxy NGC 1097 shines in southern skies, about 45 million light-years away in the heated constellation Fornax. Its blue spiral arms […]

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Processing an ultra deep 393h collaboration of M81/M82

Image: Gigapan link here: https://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/232382 I highly recommend zooming in on all of the smaller background galaxies! Image with HII This image has all HII data from the VLA added in blue-green, which highlights the extent of gravitational interactions. Gigapan link here: https://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/232383 You can view all the details and interesting features of the image here: https://www.astrobin.com/tb0sou/ Processing The processing steps here are a result of an iterative processes where I determined the best methods for this dataset. I processed the entire dataset a total of 12 […]

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Galaxy Triplet NGC 6769-71

This is another image from telescope live, of an interacting galaxy triplet plus some friends in the background. It was a really tough dataset to process – the data was badly undersampled and slighly out of focus. Very careful work with GHS and MMT helped a lot with this image, and I’m pretty happy with the amount of detail I got out considering the lack of data. Galaxy Triplet NGC 6769-71 is a gravitational interacting triplet of galaxies, located about 190 million light years away in the […]

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The Spanish Dancer Galaxy

This is another image from telescope live, NGC 1566. This was a really tough image to stack, as there was a ton of uncalibrated dust motes in a lot of the frames, and there were a lot of dark artifacts on the brightest stars. Additionally, almost half of the frames had airplane trails that wouldn’t calibrate out. I ended up using the Adam Block method of selective rejection to try and remove a lot of the worst parts during stacking, and it seemed to work pretty well. […]

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Dust lanes in the Sculptor Galaxy

Here’s another image from telescope live: NGC 253. This was a really challenging but also really rewarding dataset to wrestle with. The biggest problem with the data was that half of it was at BIN2, which meant that registration introduced a lot of weird artifacts around the stars, and drizzle couldn’t really get rid of them. I had to pioneer a Multiscale approach to the stacking of the dataset, which got rid of most of the bad areas. The end result was totally worth it – the […]

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Peering into the faint outer halo of Messier 83

This is another image from the archives of telescope live – the spiral galaxy M83. I noticed while processing that this dataset was deep enough to include a fainter outer halo that I couldn’t find, so I wanted to show as much of this new halo as I could. It was tricky to balance the brightness of the core with the brightness of the outer halo, but using some pixelmath tricks in conjunction with HDR and GHS I think I was able to do a pretty good […]

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Unbarred Spiral Galaxy NGC 3981

This is another image from the telescope live archives. The data supplied was very hard to work with – the dead CCD rows had some sort of glow that couldn’t be calibrated out, so I had to model the irregular glow on my own using DBE and then subtract it out. I’ve also been trying out the new DeepSNR noise reduction module for pixinsight which seems to remove chroma noise from RGB data quite efficiently. It’s pretty cool to look at the full-quality version of this image […]

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Spiral Galaxy NGC 3147 from Hubble

The graceful, winding arms of the majestic spiral galaxy NGC 3147 appear like a grand spiral staircase sweeping through space in this Hubble Space Telescope image. They are actually long lanes of young blue stars, pinkish nebulas, and dust in silhouette. The beauty of the galaxy belies the fact that at its very center is a malnourished black hole surrounded by a thin, compact disk of stars, gas, and dust that have been caught up in a gravitational maelstrom. The black hole’s gravity is so intense that […]

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ARP 274 from Hubble

To celebrate my 18th birthday, I decided to process one of my favorite Hubble images! This was taken back in 2009 to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy by WFPC2. Given that it was taken by such a low-sensitivity sensor, this image actually had a whole lot of noise to deal with. I spent a while carefully removing hot pixels and cosmic rays to make the image look better. In case you’re wondering what exactly you’re looking at, here’s a little explanation about the galaxies: Arp 274 […]

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