Galaxies Despite the Forecast

The NOAA partly cloudy forecast for Harvard, MA on Thursday 4/8 was not optimistic but Clear Sky Charts showed clear skies with average transparency for the night. My local skies were clear so I decided to gamble on the 45 mile trip to Harvard for a night of Coma Cluster galaxy imaging. For the most part the gamble paid off. All images below were averaged from 16 one minute subframes. While experimenting with image processing I found that applying noise reduction immediately after expanding the histogram to brighten the image makes the histogram more manageable. I'll consider elaborating in a future post.

Messier 49 - Giant Elliptical Galaxy

Messier 60(top) & Messier 59(bottom)

Messier 61 - Barred Spiral Galaxy

Clockwise from top Messier 86, NGC4402, Messier 84, NGC4387, NGC4388

Messier 88

Messier 89 (center)

Messier 90

Messier 98

Messier 99

Messier 100

NGC3521

Galaxies

By all measures this should have been a good galaxy season imaging night; clear, light winds, average transparency and seeing and not too cold at Harvard, MA. Setup and polar alignment went well. The auto-guider was working great. Everything was ready by 8:50 PM in time for my three hour imaging session. Of the 14 galaxies on my target list I managed to image eight by midnight. I considered going past midnight but my chilled fingers and toes said no. That yield was acceptable. Unfortunately I was off my mental game. In several cases I used the wrong exposure dark frame during sub frame acquisition. An inordinate amount of image processing with Paintshop Pro 2021 was necessary to produce the images below. If given another good galaxy season clear night I'll try to finish aforementioned target list while adding a few more. Equipment used: Celestron 8 with AVX mount, Starizona Night Owl 0.4X focal reducer corrector, ZWO ASI294MC Pro camera.

NGC2403

NGC2841

NGC2903

Messier 65 (top) and Messier 66

Messier 85 (bottom) and NGC4394

Messier 95

Messier 96

Clockwise from top Messier 105,NGC3389, NGC3384