Hoegaarden Astronomy & Photography
My previous processing of M109 – 360x60s – did not turn out well. Serious issues with noise, most likely calibration files that were not ok.
So I did a complete re-build of the calibration files darks and bias.
The resulting stack and processed image is noticeably better:
This galaxy lies very very close to one of the bright stars of the bowl.
An integration on several nights with 60-second subs at gain 0. This resulted in a lot of (read-?) noise. I should experiment further with Gain 100.
This is such a nice galaxy! Spiral arms and a central bar, beautiful! After the attempt to image it th elast nights with the C11 & Nikon, again a few nights (nights are short!!) now with the ASI183mm.
Th epixels are a bit small, and the C11 ‘s output is oversampled. In that respect the Nikon’s larger pixels (5µ) make more sense. However, this really worked out more acceptable then the previous attempts.
Using SIMBAD, you can identify some of the smallest and faintest patches in this image. SDSS J115703.88+532414.6 was about the faintest one with a listed green band magnitude of 20,893! The image itself measure 20′ x13′ end has a resolution of 0,6″ per pixel. Seeing was rather bad these nights, with nortwest sea air blowing over. Very clear however, with SQM 20,40 on average.
The C11 was guided with a 8×50 finderscope, using an ASI290MM. Autofocus was done using an Esatto 2″ focuser.
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