Monday, July 27, 2015

The Next Imaging List: Arp Galaxies

A quick glance at the AL list of observing programs suggested to me that the next agenda item for me is the Arp Peculiar Galaxy Northern list. This lets you image any 100 out of 338 objects in the list, which is a lot nicer than the bright nebula list. The ALBN required 100 objects out of the 132 on the list that are visible from my latitude (i.e. having a declination northward of -45 degrees). There wasn't a lot of wiggle room for the ALBN!

The submitting requirements are much saner than the BN list. Apparently all that's wanted are the images themselves. There is this strange statement:
Also, photo enhancing of your image is not required, but, again, if you choose to do so then that will be accepted.
I'm not clear about what they mean by "photo enhancing," but everyone should do at least a simple stretch. I plan on doing the usual image processing to reduce noise and get as much as I can out of the images.

Most of these objects are fairly small. The largest visible from my latitude is M101; it nicely fits into the field of  my T2i when imaged through my C 925 @ f/6.3.

My plan is to image all 100 using the same scope and imaging device. Right now I'm leaning toward using the above T2i, just for the ease of getting color.

I'd also like to use the same exposures for all the objects. There will have to be some experimentation to see what that exposure might be. If the total exposure time turns out to be short enough (10 minutes or so), I might use in-camera long exposure noise reduction (LENR) instead of dark frames.

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