04/27/2025 – Hickson 44 Galaxy Group

Wow! I did not realize it had been so long. I have not gathered any light through the scope in nearly 2 months. Glad we got a nice clear night to change that. I decided to try for Hickson 44 which is a group of galaxies in the constellation of Leo. Hickson 44 is also the April 2025 Sky-Watcher USA Target of the Month (TOTM). Nice clear sky with temperatures in the 60s, falling to the mid-50s through the night.

I uncovered the scope in the early afternoon and had a bit of a surprise. Some wasp had decided to build a nest under the cover. They are gone now. Cleaned things up a bit and just after the Sun set I shot some sky flats to use. Since it has been a bit I ran all the Windows updates on the mini-PC and updated the NINA plugins which had updates.

Once it was dark enough to see some stars through the scope I ran the auto-focus and then the three point polar alignment. My polar alignment was still pretty close, but I dialed it in a bit. Then I waited for it do get a bit darker.

Primary (Imaging)	Secondary (Guiding)
Scope: SVBONY SV503 102ED Reducer/Flattener: 0.8 Focal Reducer/Flattener (~570mm – F/5.6) Filter: None Camera: ZWO ASI294 MC Pro, Cooled to -10 C Focuser: ZWO EAF Mount: Sky Watcher EQ6-R Pro	Scope: SVBONY SV165 30mm F/4 Guide Scope Camera: Orion Star Shooter Autoguider (OSSAG)
Telescope Control, Image Acquisition, and Image Processing Software
Equipment Control and Imaging Software: NINA/PHD2/ASCOM on a Mini-PC Processing Software: GraXpert, Siril astronomical image processing tool, Siril’s Interactive Companion (Sirilic)

I kicked off my sequence at around 8:45 PM, but I had set a wait to start imaging at 9:20 PM. Once the imaging started the first thing that happened was a Meridian Flip. That all worked with out issue. I captured 88 x 120 second frames, the light for the last 8 frames of the night was through the trees. Ended up with 80 x 180 second exposures, 4 hours, of pretty decent data. The session ended around 2:30 AM and the scope parked.

This is the SirilIC stack of 80 x 180 second exposures at 121 gain, 30 offset, and bin 2×2. The new sky flats I shot were applied during the stack along with the master dark I have been using for the past several months. There is a red gradient to the upper right that I am still working on, but not too bad so far.

There are four nice galaxies in the center of the FOV: NGC 3185, NGC 3187, NGC 3190, and NGC 3193. A 5th galaxy, NGC 3177, is near the upper right corner. NGC 3187 is really interesting with its long arms. Little bit of dust lane detail in NGC 3190. Interesting light from a group of galaxies around 80-90 million or so light years away.

This is the same image as above with annotation.

If you look around a bit you will see there are a bunch of other faint far off fuzzies in the frame as well.