Instrument

12.5" RCOS @  ~f/9 (2880 mm fl) at 0.64 arcsec/pixel. Shown at 1.63 and 0.96 arcsec/pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ FW8 filter wheel, AstroDon Gen-2 Filters

Acquisition Data

4/12/2015 to 5/18/2015 Chino Valley, AZ... with CCD Commander & CCDSoft, AOL guided.

Exposure

eXcalibrator RGB ratios are 1.00, 0.99 & 1.15

Software & Processing Notes

• CCDSoft, CCDStack, PixInsight & Photoshop CS6.

• eXcalibrator v4.30 for (g:r) color balancing, using 22 stars from the SDSS-DR9 database.

• CCDBand-Aid to repair KAI-11000M vertical bars.

• CCDStack to calibrate all sub exposures and and creating the RGB image.

• PixInsight processing includes registration, stacking and data rejection for the luminance, gradient repair and non-linear stretching, with HistogramTransformation, for both the Lum and RGB images. Finally, selective use of HDRMultiscaleTransform, with various layer counts, was used to enhance the detail of the galaxies.

• PhotoShop for the LRGB combine and final touch up.

• Noiseware 5, a PhotoShop plug-in.

Comment

The galaxy is shown rotated 60° clockwise.

Located in the constellation Virgo, Messier 90 is one of the largest and brightest galaxies in the Virgo cluster. At a distance of about 59 million light-years the galaxy is blue shifted, indicating that it is moving towards Earth. To the right, is the irregular galaxy IC 3583. This galaxy is about 65 million Light-years from Earth. The two galaxies are an interacting pair with IC 3583 considered to be a satellite galaxy.

The image also contains over 1800 easily visible galaxies down to magnitude 22.5.