You need a strong tolerance for chaos to survive serious astrophotography. I lost nearly two years while troubleshooting an issue, which I thought was with my telescope, but turned out to be a power supply. Suddenly, there was a six-month period where things seemed relatively stable. And then, Windows decided to explode on my laptop, requiring a complete reinstall — none of the backups worked!
I had to reinstall and reconfigure all of my apps and get them talking to the finicky hardware again. Four hours under the sky one night verified that everything was more or less functional again. Then I had to wait for the next clear, moonless night for my chosen target — the Hidden Galaxy, IC 342.
Located in the constellation Camelopardalis, IC 342 lies right along the Milky Way’s equator. That means we are looking out through the disk of the Milky Way at this galaxy — our galaxy would appear edge-on to them. Lying along the Milky Way’s disk are clouds of dust and gas, which obscure and dim IC 342 significantly. That’s how it got its moniker, the Hidden Galaxy. Were it in any other part of the sky, it would be visible to the naked eye. At 2/3 the size of the full Moon, the galaxy is the third largest spiral galaxy visible from Earth.
I chose to image this galaxy because I knew it would be a challenge. I also wanted to improve my LRGB color imaging by experimenting with a technique I hadn’t tried before. The night of March 20 was clear and moonless, the perfect time to attempt to image a dim galaxy.
I set up a routine in NINA, my imaging app, with a loop that included three 300-second images each in red, green, and blue filters, binned 2×2 (this reduces the resolution of the color frames in exchange for increasing light sensitivity fourfold), and nine 300-second images with the luminance filter, binned 1×1 for maximum detail and resolution. One iteration of the loop was 90 minutes of data. I ran the loop twice, and my equipment behaved!
I processed the images in Pixinsight the next day. After cropping the images and removing the background gradient, I used NoiseXTerminator on the color channels relatively aggressively, and applied BlurXTerminator and NoiseXTerminator to the luminance channel. I made a straightforward combination of the LRGB channels. A range mask enabled me to brighten the galaxy relative to the background and also to use unsharp mask to enhance detail in the dust lanes of the galaxy.
It’s not the world’s most detailed image, but I’m happy with it for now. Perhaps I can add more data to it in the Fall.
