Messier 106 (also cataloged as NGC 4258) is an intermediate spiral galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici about 25 million light years from Earth.
In 2022 I decided to image this galaxy, then discovered I'd already collected 5¾ hours of data in 2020, but never published the photo here. So I acquired another 6½ hours in 2022, and added that to the 2020 data.
Even though I used significantly different camera angles in the two sessions, PixInsight was able to align the two sets of subframes. I cropped the final image to remove the extraneous areas.
| Exposure |
• 12 hours (73 X 10 minutes) @ -20°C
• Dusk flats • Camera position angles: 231° in 2020, 70° in 2022 |
| Processing |
• With PixInsight: ☞ Calibrate, star-align, and integrate subframes ☞ Crop to eliminate extraneous areas from aligning rotated subs ☞ Background neutralization ☞ Histogram transformation • Noise reduction with Topaz DeNoise AI • Final tweaking and sizing in Photoshop CS6 |
| Date and Location |
• May 12, 2020 & Feb. 5 2022 • Louisa County, Virginia, USA |
|
Equipment |
• TMB-130SS APO refractor @ f/7 on an A-P 1200 mount • ZWO ASI-1600MC Pro color camera • Guided with a ZWO ASI-120M camera on a 60mm f/5 scope • Imaging and autoguiding with MaxIm DL 6.20 • Automated image acquisition with ACP Observatory Control |
Updated May 23, 2023