The Sculptor Galaxy and NGC 288

I went back and reshot this, framing it to include both objects, where before NGC 288 was a surprise for me.

 

 

I've been wanting to shoot this galaxy for awhile and I pulled out my gear last night to do it finally. It is to the south and pretty low, near the horizon. I have to shoot towards the town of Taos to get this galaxy. I was unaware of the star cluster, NGC 288 before I began shooting last night.

 

Equipment:

Celestron CGEM Mount

Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s at f/4

Sony a7RIII (unmodified)

Altair 60mm Guide scope

GPCAM2 Mono Camera

 

Acquisition:

Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3

47 x 120" for 1 hr 34min and 47 sec of exposure time.

11 dark frames

15 flats frames

15 bais frames

Guided

 

Software:

SharpCap

PHD2

DeepSkyStacker

Photoshop

 

My mount was polar aligned with SharpCap (what an amazing system for aligning). I'm not comfortable using my SCT as my lens yet. My solution is to piggyback my Sony a7RIII and adapted Nikkor 500mm f/4 P Ai-s on a ADM dovetail rail on the top of my optical tube. I used DeepSkyStacker to combine all frames and then processed the TIFF file in Photoshop. I stretched the 32 bit file and used Gradient XT on the image. I then made it a 16 bit file and stretched in level, then curves. I used the color sampler tool and levels to do my best to keep the background space black. I then using my skillset and relied on Astronomy Tools Action Set, and dodging and burning a bit to give the image the finishing touches.

Done