This image was taken on a VERY bad night, stars were typically 5.8 arcsec FMHW low in the southern sky in western Canis Major. This final image was carefully deconvolved to 1.8 FMHW, and reveals some of the pairs intricate details and colors. The large spiral on the right is NGC2207, an 11.6 magnitude SXT4P spiral, measuring 3.2 x 2.2 arcmins in size. An extremely brilliant stellar yellow nucleus is surrounded by blue arms, complete with some pink HII regions at the limit of resolution.

The more distant galaxy on the left is IC2163, a 12.6 magnitude serial with a very peculiar appearance. It is 2.2 x 1 arcminutes in size, and consists of a yellow stellar core bounded by two bar like arms. Of extreme importance cosmologically, notice that one of the arms of NGC2207 goes in FRONT of IC2163 just to the right of the tiny yellow nucleus. So important is the data from this overlap that the Hubble was trained on this object to discern finer details.

Processing: 10 iterations of Richard Lucy Deconvolution was applied to the original luminosity frame to restore the huge bloated stars and blurred galaxy details. This is also an L(LRGB) image which preserved the color information on a very dim object.

Instrument:  12.5" f/5 Home made Newtonian
Platform:  Astrophysics 1200 QMD
CCD Camera:  SBIG ST7E w/Enhanced Cooling
Exposure:  L(LRGB) = 60:10:10:18 (RGB Binned 2x2)
Filters:  RGB Tricolor
Location:  Payson, Arizona
Elevation:  5150 ft.
Sky:  Seeing FMHW = 5.8 arcsec, Transparency 7/10
Outside Temperature:  0 C
CCD Temperature:  -35 C
Processing:  Maxim DL, Photoshop, AIP4WIN, PW Pro.