Hickson 44 Compact Galaxy Group

Your Shot with Voyager
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I processed my data on HCG 44 today. It’s about 22 hours of R, G and B data collected with Voyager, of course, and processed with Siril and gess for calibration, followed by PI for everything else.

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I usually just raise color saturation on the entire image with a luminance mask. This time I did it in two passes, once with a PI GAME script luminance mask targeting the galaxies alone, and then with a star mask. With the star mask applied, I reduced RGB/K brightness which also shrank the stars, then increased color. The stars ended up small enough for my taste that I didn’t do any further reduction.

I like the variety of galaxies in this group - they all have personality! Would be interesting to go deeper and see how much of the galaxy halos I could get from here.

Cheers,
Rowland

6 Likes
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Congrats Rowland, not an easy target.
Wonderful color on galaxies and deep rendition

All the best
Leonardo

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Thanks Leo. As another imager friend pointed out, it’s only a 20 arcmin field so when you zoom in at that size the seeing really starts to have a big impact on details. Our average seeing here is 2.5 to 4 arcsecs and the image scale for this is 0.47 arc-sec per pixel. Not an easy target but it’s always fun to push the limits and see what you can get.

Cheers,
Rowland