Daily Image
22-03-2019
NGC3486 automatic colour calibration
| Submitter: | Albert van Duin |
| Description: | Usually I have to manually colour calibrate my images, but a very useful addition to the PixInsight software package makes life a lot easier now. After combining the red, green and blue channels to create an RGB colour image, a plate solve is performed to determine the celestial coordinates of the center of the image. Then the PhotometricColourCalibration module connects to the CDS server in Strasbourg in France to retrieve (from a catalog) the colour indices of the stars that were found in the image. Then the module uses these values to calibrate the background as well as the colour balance of the image. To show the colours a little better they were saturated a bit. Old star populations are shown as yellow, young populations as blue, and star forming regions as pink. The image shows NGC3486, a barred spiral in Leo Minor, it was discovered in 1785 by William Herschel. NGC3486 is a borderline, low-luminosity Seyfert galaxy with an active nucleus. However, no radio or X-ray emission has been detected from the core, and it may only have a small supermassive black hole with less than a million times the mass of the Sun. (source Wikipedia) This image is a LRGB combination of 18 integrations of 600s each with a Luminance filter, and 9 integrations of 600s for each of the RGB filters, 7.5 hours total integration time. For a full size image please visit: https://www.astrobin.com/392400/D/?nc=user |
| Copyright: | astropix.nl |
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