NOVAC Event Calendar

NOVAC’s Byron Berget Imaging Group will hold its next processing party on Saturday September 5 from 10am to 1pm at the Patrick Henry Library in Vienna. The room is just inside the main door to the right. Bring your images from AHSP or your backyard, your laptops, or just your questions, and we’ll process our data and discuss imaging techniques. Like usual, our group is low stress. No agenda, no presentations, just hanging out and learning from other people who take pictures of the stars. Hope to see you then.

Note that this is a change from a date (Aug 29) some of us had discussed a while back. Apologies to anyone who wasn’t included in the rescheduling discussion. I was still posting to the listserv from my Yahoo address then, and most things weren’t getting through.

For the same reasons, I’m reposting a message below about a few galaxy images I processed recently:

I finally starting to get a stable processing routine in PixInsight for my LRGB images, and have managed to get through a bunch of galaxies that I shot since last fall. These were all taken from my little backyard dog-servatory in Dunn Loring, between Tysons Corner and the Mosaic District, so you know there’s plenty of light pollution. The springtime galaxy images really suffered from this, as transparency was lower then and the soggy air reflected more light back down into the scope. Seeing was also much better for the one image shot in the fall (NGC 891), so details are sharper in that image. FWHM (a measure of sharpness of the stars in the image) was 1.95 arcsecs for that one, vs. 2.7 for the three shot in the spring.

NGC 891 is the best of them. It’s “the other Andromeda galaxy,” also sometimes called The Outer Limits galaxy because it was used in the opening sequence to that old TV show. NGC 4244 is the Silver Needle Galaxy. I was really surprised at the amount of detail in the star clouds, but it turns out that NGC 4244 is quite close, just outside our local group, at 13 million light years. NGC 5921 in Virgo is a bit off the beaten track, as it’s pretty small compared to other spring galaxies. But I like the barred spiral structure. NGC 4565 may be familiar, as it’s one of the brightest edge-on galaxies of springtime. The last two galaxies probably look quite a bit less detailed than the first two, mostly because they only have 2-3 hours of exposure time vs 5-7 on the first two. As usual, spring skies weren’t very cooperative.

These were all taken with a CPC1100 and an SXVR-H694 camera. Full details are located below each image.