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NGC 3344, Session from 17.02.2018 - 24.02.2018

The month's finale of the february was absolutely magnificent. There were almost more clear than cloudy nights and so I was able to photograph with NGC 3344 another galaxy. Unfortunately I had to postpone the intended target Sh2-224, because a stubborn tilt at the Epsilon spoiled my pictures. I didn't want to waste the moonless nights with hours of tinkering, so I switched to the Newton and the galaxy.


Of the four nights spent, one was unfortunately useless due to poor seeing. I didn't use most of the frames from 20.02.2018. Nevertheless, a total of about 21 hours of material were collected. This is an order of magnitude that the galaxy also needs if you want to get a few more details.

As so often, unfortunately, I had to struggle with reflections in the finished image stack, as you can see on the example of luminance:

 

 

So I had to create an artificial flat, which I made in Photoshop from the luminance picture. First I remove the stars (using Troy's Astro Actions' action "Just remove the stars"), then I stamp out the rest of the stars with the "Band-Aid" tool, as well as the galaxy that these areas are filled with background. Then "Interpolate brightness" again and soften. It looks like this:

 

 

After using the formula "luminance-flat+med(flat)" in Pixelmath in Pixinsight he rsult is a wonderfull flat image:

 

 

The processed image is here ...


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