NGC 6744 - Galaxy - Explored September 09, 2020

NGC 6744 is an intermediate spiral galaxy about 30 million light years away from Earth in the constellation Pavo. It also has at least one distorted companion galaxy (NGC 6744A) which is similar to one of the Magellanic Clouds. It was discovered by James Dunlop a Scottish astronomer in Parramatta Australia on 30 June 1826.

 

We are extremely happy with how this image came out considering we lost 15 x 300 seconds of RGB frames due to some issue that I have not identified yet. There were also some extreme gradients which took some innovative processing to remove in PixInsight.

 

Equipment Details:

•8 Inch Skywatcher Quattro Carbon Fibre F4.0 Newtonian Reflector

•Skywatcher NEQ6 Mount

•SBIG STT 8300m CCD Camera cooled to -20'c

•SBIG FW8G-STT Filter Wheel

•Baader Lum, Red, Green, Blue Filters

•SKywatcher BD 102mm Guide Scope

•Meade DSIii CCD Guide Camera

•Polemaster for polar alignment

 

Exposure Details:

•Lum 23X300 seconds - Bin 1x1

•Red 3X300 seconds - Bin 1x1

•Green 3X300 seconds - Bin 1x1

•Blue 3X300 seconds - Bin 1x1

 

Total Integration Time: 2.35 hours

Done