Mario Motta: Observer from Massachusetts

Attached are my submissions for the June Observer’s Challenge objects, galaxies NGC 5774/5.

An Interesting interacting pair, however for the imagers it was difficult to process, due to the relative brightness of 5775 vs 5774.

Galaxy 5774 was dimer than 5775 and was blown out too bright when processing. I finally solved this by creating individual digital masks for each galaxy, then optimally processing each of them. It will be interesting if visual observers note the brightness difference. (Note: I did not, at this point get a chance to observe visually)

These galaxies are 70 MLY away in virgo, and are interacting pairs. Looking closely you can see a spiral arm on NGC 5774 being pulled out and flowing into NGC 5775. This took some teasing out digitally to preserve this detail in my image. This is similar to the interaction of M51 and the companion. Also, NGC 5775 is well known to have an intense “vertical” magnetic field around the galaxy as seen with the radio VLA.

This image was taken with Lum, R/G/B, and a touch of Ha. about 5 hours imaging in all, then processed in pixinsight with special processing to bring out the faint detail, especially in NGC 5774.

Taken with my 32-inch f/6.5 telescope, and ZWO ASI6200 camera.

This entry was posted on May 18, 2023 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Work File Only - Observer's Challenge Reports. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.