Distance: 509 Mly, in the constellation Hercules
Centered on RA: 16h 05m 21s; Dec: +17° 42' 11" (J2000).
The wavy shaped galaxy is NGC6045. Distance: 447 Mly

Telescope configuration: Celestron EdgeHD 1400 with the Celestron 0.7x focal reducer (fl=2737, f/7.7), unbinned, yielding an image scale of 0.40 arc-seconds/pixel.
Camera: SBIG STF-8300M (monochrome) CCD camera. 3 - 15 minute exposures at -15C and 4 - 20 minute exposures, no filter, taken Feb 20th and 27th, 2015. Image capture using TSXPro/Camera Add-on.
Mount: Software Bisque Paramount MX with PEC and ProTrack enabled. Autoguided with an SBIG Sti autoguider, a Celestron OAG (off-axis guider) and a Starlight Xpress AOLF (Adaptive Optics Large Format) device using PHD2 autoguiding software.
Post processing: Calibration, alignment, stacking in ImagesPlus 6.0 using 7 dark frames, 9 bias frames and 9 flat frames; DDP, Adaptive Richarson-Lucey deconvolution and noise reduction in ImagesPlus 6.0, 13x13 by 10 passes; curves in Nebulosity3; contrast enhancement, rotated and resized to 50pct in ThumbsPlus.

To see the galaxies in deeper detail, click on the "original" (full resolution) size below.


20150227_NGC6045-2-CombExcAvg-IPddparlnr-NEBcrv-TPadj.jpg