NGC 2403

NGC 2403 was imaged in March 2017. Integration time is 12 hours in HaLRGB and processed in Pixinsight. I wished I had more integration time, but the weather prevented any chance of gathering more photons. The jetstream is above Kyushu during the winter. This causes the "seeing" conditions to decline, making focusing a challenge. FWHM averaged above 3.5 most of the integration time. It was frustrating to go outside and see that the night sky was crystal clear, but the high winds in the atmosphere was making focusing close to impossible. This produced bloated stars in many of the images. Rather than throwing out those images, I went ahead and processed what I had. No worries, there's always next year to try again. 

NGC 2403 is a spiral galaxy located about 10 million light years away. Here’s a much better photo of this galaxy. Image processing continues to be challenging, frustrating, and rewarding. The original image contains much more detail, but some of that detail was lost converting to a format suitable for this blog. On to the next project...the Needle Galaxy (NGC 4565).