After some silence, I’m returning to deep sky imaging with this image of the Arp 84 galactical complex.
A new setup, a joint project between me, Samuel Díaz Lopéz, and Jaime Alemany, was a bit tricky to get in order. Things are exacerbated by an order of magnitude because of the remote location of the observatory, and it took several trips to get things usable.
The observatory now hosts a GSO RC12 Truss telescope on a Paramount MX mount. Samuel’s Atik 4000 CCD is still operational, because of some trouble setting up Jaime’s QHY22.
Anyway, after a few troubled months, we were able to collect enough data for the first official light.
The image you see above (just a crop, click through for the full field) depicts Arp 84, the galactical interaction of NGC 5395 and NGC 5394.
The cosmic collision is in the constellation of Canes Vanatici, and approximately 55 milion parsecs away.
A bit over twelve hours were put into the collection of photons. The image featured here is the fruit of my labour with PixInsight and The Gimp.
It’s also available on AstroBin of course: Arp 84 on AstroBin