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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