Instrument

12.5" RCOS @ ~ f/9 (2880 mm fl) at 0.64 arcsec/pixel. Shown at  0.74 and 1.28 arcsec/pixel.

Mount

Paramount ME

Camera

SBIG STL-11000 w/ FW8 filter wheel & AstroDon Gen-2 LRGB filters.

Acquisition Data

10/03/2015 to 11/09/2015 Chino Valley, AZ.  with CCD Commander & CCDSoft.  AOL guided

Exposure

eXcalibrator RGB ratios are 1.00, 0.93 & 1.01

Software & Processing Notes

• CCDSoft, CCDStack, PixInsight, Photoshop CS6.

• eXcalibrator v5.1 for (g:r) color balancing, using 64 stars from the SDSS-DR9 database.

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

• CCDStack to calibrate all sub exposures.

• PixInsight to register, normalize, data reject, combine the sub exposures, gradient removal, non-linear stretching with HistogramTransformation and to create the LRGB image.

• Noiseware 5, a PhotoShop plug-in.

• PhotoShop final touch-up includes background noise reduction and selective sharpening.

Comment

North is to the top.

NGC 7814, sometimes called the Little Sombrero, is about 40 million light years away in the constellation Pegasus. The actual size is about the same as its more famous namesake M104. The little Sombrero is simply much farther away. A faint dwarf galaxy, possibly a satellite, is visible to the left, perpendicular to the center of NGC 7814.

The image also contains a 19th magnitude quasar. The red shift of 3.67 gives it a light travel time of 11.6 billion years.