These are all the objects I managed to image on the night of Wednesday, April 29, 2020 and on into Thursday morning. SharpCap 3.2 LiveStacking with dark and flat calibration plus dithering was used for acquisition. Only minimal processing for all of these captures in Fitsworks and PS CS3.
I was trying not to waste a very clear evening after a storm had moved through earlier that day. Not too bad, I guess.
Not the best of nights with moonlight and high clouds, but I did manage to get enough data for a preliminary image of the Whale and Crowbar Galaxies.
Here is the detail view:
Cut short by clouds! I have been wanting to get this object, too. It was finally in an area of the sky and there at the right time for me to get at least 90 minutes worth of time on it. But, the clouds came in and ruined things only half-way in. What I did get was decent, at least.
Two sets of data taken back to back. First set was with 30 sec, high-gain sub-images and the 2nd set was with 60 sec subs at medium gain. Total time was 3.65 hours. Cropped about 50% out to isolate the galaxy. The 60 sec subs were better, but only because I had centered the target better and it was higher in the sky when I started the set.
This image is still in process. It was not the best night for attempting this since transparency was poor at the time of imaging it. Lots of LP in the 4 hrs of exposure accumulated and almost overwhelmed the dim galaxies. The color was zapped out, so I took an image with only about 2 hrs of time and used it as color and the 4 hrs of exposure was used as luminosity.
A quickie Sunflower Galaxy. Needs more exposure, obviously. I killed some time waiting for M64 to get into position shooting this.
This object was the main goal of the night. Not quite the 3 hrs I wanted to give it, but almost. I took a nap while this was brewing, and ended it since the mount needed a meridian flip to keep going. Instead of doing that, I decided to get M13 instead.
Here’s a detail crop view with a little more color saturation to go along with the above:
3 hours of exposure for this object. I used SharpCap 3.2 LiveStacking and a Baader UHC-S filter to cut through the light pollution in a Bortle 8 Red Zone metro area.