ASTRO: NGC 4725 & NC 4712

With my lousy skies the past two months all I've managed is 20 minutes
her and 10 minutes there. I move to one sucker hole to the next to the
next each taking what few photons I can get but sometimes feeling like I
have a huge 3" scope for few the photons getting through. Now many of
these half taken objects have moved so far west they are out of reach
until next year. So if there's enough to process anything useful I am.
Nothing else is possible for now.

This is an example. I did get two of the luminosity images under good
transparency but lousy seeing and two under better seeing but lousy
transparency. No matter how I combine them the result is below par.
Then I got only one color image for each channel and that was only by
binning 3x3 to get enough photons through the gunk to get much at all.
Blue was taken so low in the sky through a sucker hole that was open
only part of the time, it was much darker and fuzzier than the others.
In all I took data over 8 nights and used data from 5 of those, the
other three being too lousy to use. So the color data is very noisy. I
used a 3 pixel Gaussian blur on the RGB image to try and hide as much of
the noise as possible before I combined it with the L image. Even so
the color is very uneven. I'll have to wait until next year to try
again. I've fought this one way longer than it deserves as it is.

NGC 4725 is called a ring, one armed barred spiral at 43 million light
years while 4712 is a normal spiral at about 200 million light years or
nearly 5 times as far away. The single arm of 4725 is best seen in
infra-red with the Spitzer Space Telescope.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050901.html

The image is missing my normal faint stars and has a red cast to the
background due to the thin luminosity data and really thin blue data.
The blue regions of 4725 must really be a lot bluer than they are shown
here if I had good blue data to work with.

Still for all my complaining this is a far better version of the galaxy
than I ever got on film so I should be really happy. It's just that I
know I could do better and that bugs me.

14" LX200R @ f/10, L=4x10' (two through gunk) binned 2x2, RGB=1x10'
binned 3x3 and taken through even worse gunk, STL-11000XM, Paramount ME

Rick

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Third character is a zero rather than a capital "Oh".