Spiral Galaxy NGC 2403
This beautiful face-on spiral galaxy in Camelopardalis (The Giraffe) is an outlying member of the M 81 Group of galaxies.
NGC 2403 is among the more conspicuous Northern objects which Charles Messier missed when compiling his catalog.
Thus its discovery was left to William Herschel.
NGC 2403 resides about 12 million light years from Earth. The pink areas are areas of star birth.
At the nine o-clock position half way out from the galaxy core (a small round red bright area) is Supernova (SN2004dj) that was discovered by Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki on July 31, 2004
Taken December 13, 2004
Kitt Peak National Observatory
Image Credit: Fred Calvert / Adam Block / KPNO /AURA / NSF
Equipment:
20" RC Optics Systems Telescope @ F 5.5 on a Paramount ME Robotic Mount
SBIG ST10XME w Color Filter Wheel & AO-7 Adaptive Optics
Exposure Data:
LRGB
Luminance = 75 minutes binned 1 X 1
Red = 20 minutes binned 1 X 1
Green = 20 minutes binned 1 X 1
Blue = 20 minutes binned 1 X 1
Two iterations of L-R deconvolution (sharping) alorithm using CCDsharp were applied to the luminance image.
Digital Development (DDP) via Maxim DL 4 was also used in order to display the very dim and very bright details of this image.
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