NGC 5171
by Vern on Jun.02, 2006, under Astronomy, Deep sky, Galaxy, Galaxy cluster
I recently received the “Galaxy Groups and Clusters” book from the Astroleague and decided to try imaging some of the listed objects. Below is an image of NGC 5171 in constellation Virgo. There are at least 9, probably more galaxies shown in the image which I’ve identified 7. 
Location Louisville, CO, time 11:45 to 0:015 MDT. Weather clear, temperature 57°F, humidty 60%, no wind, clear sky, transparency very good, turbulence good (6/10). Equipment used was a Celestron Nexstar11, Meade F3.3 focal reducer, and Astrovid Stellacam II video camera. Integration at 256, gamma at medium and gain at 9/14. Fifteen minutes of video was dark subtracted, flat field and bias corrected. Aligned and stacked with Registax3, brightness enhanced with ImagePlus, cropped and labeled with Photoshop Elements2.
June 3rd, 2006 on 9:57 am
Hi Vern,
Do you know of any processing programs specifically designed for use with a DSLR?.
June 3rd, 2006 on 10:36 am
I have ImagePlus available from http://www.mlunsold.com/ . It is reasonably good, fairly easy to use, but expensive to keep up to date (I haven’t done so). IRIS, available from http://www.astrosurf.com/buil/us/iris/iris.htm ,has DSLR support as well and the price is right (free). I’ve played with it a couple times, but it is non-intuitive to use — it would probably be okay once you got beyond the learning curve.
June 3rd, 2006 on 11:26 am
Thanks Vern,I have downloaded Iris and now it looks like I will be spending a lot of time learning how to use it.