Distance 26.2 Mly

Telescope configuration: Celestron EdgeHD 1100 with the Celestron 0.7x focal reducer (fl=1960mm, f/7.0).
Camera: Nikon D5300. Exposures: 9 @ 8 min., Ambient temp 66f.
Image capture scale: 0.41 arc-sec/pixel (un-binned). Resized to 50% in ThumbsPlus. Final image scale/resolution 0.82 as/p. Field of view (horizontal) = 24.5 arc-min. Image capture using ImagesPlus Camera Control 6.0.
Mount: Orion HDX110 German equatorial mount. Autoguided with an SBIG Sti autoguider and a Celestron OAG (off-axis guider), with PHD2 autoguiding software, dithered by PHD2.
Post processing: ImagesPlus 6.5: NEF conversion and calibration, alignment, stacking/combining using 0 dark frames, a 5 bias frame master and 0 flat frames, Average combined. HDR Stretch, Curves and multiple enhancements in ImagesPlus. Curves in Nebulosity4. Adaptive Richardson-Lucy deconvolution (sharpening) in ImagesPlus 6.5 (7x7x5 passes), noise reduction in IP. Cropped and resized to final dimensions, one pass unsharp mask in ThumbsPlus.


20160424_NGC3521_CombExcAvg-IPddpadj-NEBcrv-IParl-TPadj-IPnr-TPadj.jpg