After the rush of holiday activities subsided, I managed to get one night’s worth of imaging done on December 30th. My target was NGC 1530, a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Camelopardalis. It is located near the north celestial pole and only reaches 48° altitude at transit. I started imaging when it was about 43° altitude. It is fairly dim at magnitude 12.5 and small, with a major axis of 1.8 arc minutes.

The night was dry and cool. The temperature fell from about 45° F at sunset to about 29° F when I shut things down at 1:30am. The dew point was below 10° F so dew was not a problem. Set up and imaging was fairly uneventful. Thankfully everything worked (unlike the last time I was out, but that’s a different story).

The image was taken with a Planewave CDK 12.5 scope and an SBIG ST-10XME camera on an Astro-Physics AP1200 mount. I took 150 minutes of luminance and 45 minutes each of red, green, and blue in 5 minute sub-exposures. Data capture and camera control was done with Maxim DL. Automation from CCD Commander. (See my post on planning and imaging software.) I calibrated and processed the data in PixInsight.

With this dim object I could have used more exposure time. The color is a little noisy. Overall I think it is a nice image of an interesting galaxy. A full sized image is in the photo gallery.