NGC 2419 "The Intergalactic Wanderer"

May 17th, 2022

Processing in Siril. Captured on April 29 through a Sky-Watcher bkp2001 HEQ-5 PRO telescope with a Nikon D5300 (binning 2), SharpStar 0.95x coma corrector, and ZWO ASIAIR PLUS. Shot in ASIAIR, stacked in DSS, background alignment, curves, and white balance in Siril, post-processing in Photoshop. The green channel was extracted separately. Stacked 30 frames at 40 seconds each, ISO 400. Total integration time: 20 minutes. 15 dark frames taken for calibration.

May 3rd, 2022

20 m

NGC 2419, also known as Caldwell 25 or the "Intergalactic Wanderer," is a faint (+9m) and very distant globular cluster in Lynx, located about 300,000 light-years from the Sun and roughly the same distance from the Galactic center. Interestingly, it is even closer to the Large Magellanic Cloud than to the center of our Galaxy, which led to it being considered a separate stellar system, not bound to the Milky Way, in the mid-20th century. Captured on April 29 using a Sky-Watcher bkp2001 HEQ-5 PRO telescope with a Nikon D5300 (2x binning), a SharpStar 0.95x coma corrector, and a ZWO ASIAIR PLUS. Acquisition was done via ASIAIR, stacking in DSS, background leveling in FitsWork4, gamma adjustment in FitStacker 13, and post-processing in Photoshop. A total of 30 frames at 40 seconds each, ISO 400, were combined for 20 minutes of total integration. 15 dark frames were used for calibration.