Bodes Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy

Jason Moore

    Number of Works 1

Deep Sky

February 09, 2026

2

0

Description

Bodes Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy. Both done with narrowband SHO filters in two different color palates, as well as cropped out. I ended up with over 100 frames of 720 second exposures on the "Bodes Galaxy" section of the night sky. This has been an ongoing project since the end of December. Picking at it each night to end up with this. Sv550 122mm refractor w/.8 flattener Zwo 533mm, 174mm mini/guide, EAF, EFW, Am5n, Asiair Sv198 guide scope Touptek 6.5nm 2 inch SHO filters These turned out much better than I thought that they would. I tried these with a color camera last year and just couldn't capture this detail, even with more data. Mono imaging is king with different filters. On the Cigar that looks really cool. I think I'm going to try at least one of these targets again with more focal length, making it bigger to start with. I cropped them to get the separate images but they turned out pretty good.  Essentially you can use a "one shot color" camera to do this, or you can take a monochrome camera with no color, then you have to use different filters to bring out the colors so the human eye can see it. I use red, green, & blue filters to make a color image. Basically taking pictures of a galaxy with one color for a few hours, then switching filters and so on. The images here were using narrowband filters since the moon has been out, which mitigates a lot of stray light from the moon. After all of the pictures are taken, say 40 hours worth of pictures, then all the images are stacked together with software, and I end up with a "master" picture of each color filter. Then I process them, and combine them using 2 different softwares. My telescopes are all fully automated to switch filters and track the sky, and so on. As long as there aren't any clouds, I just tell it which targets and which filters and go to bed. Just to give you a better idea of some of this. It's a huge ball of wax taken well over a year to even get started.

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