NGC 5248 - A Spiral Galaxy in Bootes
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Also known as Caldwell 45, NGC 5248 is a beautiful spiral galaxy which is a member of the Virgo cluster of galaxies. The galaxy is classified as a star burst galaxy. At 6' x 4' angular size, the galaxy is a challenging target.
In this photo, North is Up. This image is cropped to 42% of the original full frame.
Exposure Details |
Lens |
Celestron C-8 SCT with Celestron focal reducer |
Focal Length |
1160mm |
Focal Ratio |
f/5.8 |
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Mount |
Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2 inch Byers gear |
Guiding |
ONAG On-Axis Guider, Lodestar autoguider, PHD Guiding |
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Camera |
Canon 450D - Gary Honis modified |
Exposure |
119 subexposures of 300 seconds each at ISO 1600 - about 10 hours total |
Calibration |
20 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias |
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Date |
May 30 and 31, and June 1, 2013 |
Temperature |
56F on 5/30, 59F on 5/31, 66F on 6/1 |
SQM Reading |
21.4 (Bortle 4) on all 3 nights |
Seeing |
2 of 5 on 5/30, 4 of 5 on 5/31 and 6/1 |
Location |
Pine Mountain Club, California |
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Software Used |
Images Plus 5.0 for camera control, IP 5.5 Beta for calibration, stacking, digital development, star shrinking and halo reduction, smoothing and noise reduction, advanced Lucy-Richardson deconvolution, and multiresolution sharpening. Photoshop CS5 used for levels and curves, high pass filter, star shrinking, screen mask invert, lab color, saturation adjustments, selective color, vibrance, match color and lens correction. Gradient Xterminator for gradient removal. Carboni Tools for additional noise reduction, and smoothing. HLVG for additional color correction. Registar for aligning stacks and composites and for color channel alignment. Focus Magic for focus restoration. |
Notes |
I was quite happy with the details I was able to capture in this galaxy. The galaxy has a faint outer halo, and I was also pleased with how well it came out. |
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