Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) 0.64 arcsec / pixel.  The Zoomify image scale is 0.85 to 3.42 arcsec / pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ internal filter wheel, AstroDon Gen I Filters

Acquisition Data

11/13/2010 to 1/3/2011 Chino Valley, AZ... with CCDAutoPilot3 & CCDSoft.  AOL guided

Exposure

Lum (no filter)  465 min (31 x 15 min, bin 1x1)

RGB                765 min (17 x 15 min each, bin 2x2)

Software

• CCDSoft, CCDStack, Photoshop CS w/ the Fits Liberator plugin, Noel Carboni's actions and and Russell Croman's GradientXTerminator.

• eXcalibrator for (u-g), (g-r) color calibration, using 10 stars from the SDSS-DR7 database.

• PixFix32 (pre-beta) to repair column defects.

• CCDStack to calibrate, register, normalize, data reject,  combining the sub exposures and RGB combine

• PhotoShop for non-linear stretching and LRGB combine.

North is to the top.

The Perseus galaxy cluster (Abell 426) is about 250 million light-years from our galaxy and contains more that 500 catalogued galaxies. The brightest member is NGC 1275, near the left edge of the image, at magnitude 11.6. NGC 1275 is a strong source of radio waves and x-rays.

Abell 426 is the dominant member of the Perseus-Pisces supercluster. The super cluster extends to 300 million light-years and covers 40 degrees of the winter sky.