Date Posted: 1/13/2024 (Updated)
Date Taken: 10/24/2016, 10/28/2016, 10/29/2016, 11/4/2016
Scope: Planewave CDK 12.5 f/8, 2541mm
Camera: SBIG STL-11000 with Astrodon Tru-Balance E-Series Gen2 filters
Temp: -15C
Mount: Losmandy Titan
Guiding: SSAG, Celestron 80mm guide scope, 600mm.
Exposure: LRGB 240:110:125:110 All subs 5min. Luminance unbinned, RGB binned 2x2.

Calibrated and Stacked with CCDStack2; RGB combine and DDP with MaximDL. Processed with CS4.

IC342 is a beautiful facing spiral galaxy about 11 million light years away. It is known as the Hidden Galaxy, because it lies very close to the galactic plane, and is significantly obscured by intervening dust and gas. It has the third largest angular size of galaxies in our sky, behind only Andromeda (M31) and the Triangulum Galaxy (M33).

Lots of signal with this one. This is one of my favorite galaxies.

Update 1/13/2024:
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I did some additional work on this image. I re-processed the luminance, and StarXTerminator allowed me to do significantly more stretching. Surprisingly, I kept the original RGB image from 2016, and tweaked the colors. StarShrink allowed me to reduce the star bloat.

The difference from the 2016 image is quite striking. If you look in the Galaxies collection, you can see then side-by-side. Even though I did it, it's hard to believe that both are just different interpretations of the same data.