Southern Pinwheel Galaxy - M83

[JimFox]

There is a Pinwheel Galaxy that everyone knows about, but can only be captured in the Northern Hemisphere to my knowledge. So the guys down south below the equator came up with their own Pinwheel Galaxy and called it the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy.

This is from Luminance data from a remote site, as I did not travel south of the border for this.

All of the capture data I have is this:

Planewave 17" CDK Reflector, 2912mm FL

Luminance only

Lum: 9 x 3 minutes.

It's free data as long as credit is given to the person who captured it. - "Data Acquisition by Douglas Gardner, www.remote-astrophotography.com"

The data looks pretty good even though it's short. What I am learning on the go here is that Luminance data is only B&W data. It is used to reduce noise and get sharper stars I think. Since I am learning on the go, I hadn't picked up yet that Luminance Data would be just B&W. I was a bit disappointed, okay I was a lot disappointed as I just assumed it would be in color. Especially after spending an hour downloading data, color data would have been nice. But it's all a learning curve, so that's what is important.

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[AlanLichty]

Definitely looks like a pinwheel. Did they only have the luminance data available or is that just what you happened to download?

 

[JimFox]

Definitely looks like a pinwheel. Did they only have the luminance data available or is that just what you happened to download?

Thanks Alan!

Douglas has like 20 different objects available for download, and they all are just the Luminance data, except I think one or two. I am going to go back on his site in a second as I thought one of them listed LRGB data.

It's nice to have the data be free. But it would be nice to have color options. I will probably use Telescope Live for a while to get data to play with. Once I upgrade a few more items on my Astro gear, I think I will bring back our Resource Area, and I will list the color data for Free download here that I capture.

 

[Mike Lewis]

That looks very good - now go get the color data and add it in!

ML

 

[JimFox]

That looks very good - now go get the color data and add it in!

ML

Thanks Mike. There is no color data, it was just luminance.

 

[Trent Watts]

Boy this stuff is way over my head.

 

[JimFox]

Boy this stuff is way over my head.

Thanks Trent! There is quite a bit of a learning curve for sure. I only started out 1.5 years ago with the Deep Space Astro and I am slowly getting to understand it.