NGC 6946     Also known as Caldwell 12, and as the Fireworks Galaxy

At only 10 million LY distance NGC 6946 is part of our Local Galaxy Group. This 8.9 mag galaxy is pretty easy pickings with a CCD camera, and apparently Caldwell thought it was a pretty good naked eye object.
 

Meade 14” LX200 GPS @ f/3.3 Meade DSI III Pro Guided
Unbinned Lum 19 X 120sec 2 X 2 Binned RGB 5 X 60sec
21:46 – 23:14 hrs., 23 Sep 08 Wishing Star Observatory


At 2 minutes I was pushing the light pollution envelope this night, and had to push process the PS to bring out the luminance image. In doing so there was a bit of objectionable noise. As a compromise of sharp image vs noise, I conceeded the battle with noise and did a mild Gausian blur.  Still not satisfied, I shrank the image and sharpened it.  This is a spectacular galaxy and I'll be revisiting it with a modified setup.

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