NGC 2903

NGC 2903: This barred spiral galaxy is in the constellation Leo. It is one of the brighter northern hemisphere galaxies that did not make Messier's list of "bright fuzzy objects" that were not comets. The galaxy is approximately 25-30 Mly distant, and shows dust lanes and blue regions of newly formed massive stars. The core region shows some interesting structure, or "hot spots" that were shown by the Hubble Space Telescope to be several newly formed globular clusters.

NGC: 2903
Right Ascension: 9h 32m
Declination: 21° 30'
Apparent Magnitude: 9.7

Date: May 2014
Equipment:
Telescope: Meade 16" Schmidt Cassegrain with f6.3 reducer
Camera: SBIG ST-10XE
Guiding: Meade 5" refractor; Starshoot Autoguider; PHD

Exposure:
L: 7x10 minute subframes binned 1x1.
Color frames were taken with photometric (RVB), rather than photographic (RGB) filters.
R: 9x5 minute subframes binned 2x2.
V: 10x5 minute subframes binned 2x2.
B: 11x5 minute subframes binned 2x2.

Processing Notes: Data acquisition with CCDSoft. Reduction, and alignment, data selection and combination with CCDStack. RVB was combined in CCDStack with a ratio of ~1:1.7:5, and using a background white balance. L and RVB images were stretched and tweaked separately in Photoshop and combined with layers. Significant smoothing and increase in color saturation on RVB image. The luminance layer received slight sharpening via unsharp mask on the brighter areas, and Gaussian blur on the dimmer areas. Contrast enhancement was achieved by applying a highpass filter in a duplicate luminance layer set as an overlay.
Scale: .53"/pixel

Links to images of this object on other sites:
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap010321.html
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/aop/observers/n2903.html

Additional Comments: Some of the luminance frames used in this image were acquired in summer 2013. The other luminance frames were "pre-data", as the telescope was waiting to record supernova luminance images. The RVB was taken over two nights in March and May, 2014.

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