Hickson 51 processed

[Simon]

Well, I've managed to get some time to have a go at processing Hickson 51, and it's rather quite an interesting group of galaxies. You can see the image and some more details here:

http://planet-si.blogspot.com/

I failed to find a good image of the cluster on the internet - the best coming from the Palomar POSSII survey. This image seems to show even more detail than on those images - dust lanes across one of the members, and a very subtle (but still just visible) face on spiral. What is intriguing me though is the "star" on the face of HCG-51b. It's not a processing artefact, only visible on the red filtered images, and does not seem to be visible on the Palomar plates ... I guess I can wish it's something exciting like a supernova, but I suspect not ... anyone any ideas?

This image was processed with Iris. Stacks of all 10 exposures with the red and green filters were made, but only 4 for the blue due to movement of the 'scope during the exposure. I think we could have gone deeper on these exposures, but the greater stack number certainly helped the reduction of noise. The red was the strongest channel, and the blue the faintest (and most noisy).

Cheers,
Simon.