StarTools

NGC 2217 is part of my on-going project to image peculiar galaxies in the Southern Hemisphere. The following text and image were uploaded to Astrobin this morning, at this URL https://www.astrobin.com/c5i0ph/?nc=user

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NGC 2217: The Swirling Galaxy

This galaxy (very rarely imaged by amateurs) has two ring structures; the oval inner ring around the bar and the nearly perfectly circular ring further out. The inner nucleus and bar are very bright and concentrated. NGC 2217 has been imaged by both Hubble and ESO.

It might be tempting to call NGC 2217 a “ring galaxy,” but the Catalog of Southern Peculiar Galaxies and Associations, by Halton Arp and Barry Madore, excludes galaxies where spiral arms have become tightly wound into a circle or near circle.

NGC 2217 qualifies as a peculiar galaxy in a number of different categories:

Category 8: Galaxies with Apparent Companions
Category 10: Galaxies with Peculiar Spiral Arms
Category 13: Compact Galaxies (thanks to the very bright core)
Category 14: Galaxies with Prominent or Unusual Dust Absorption

Tech Notes for ASA 500/3.6:
ASA Newtonian, 500 mm aperture, 1900mm focal length, F3.6
FLI Proline 16803, 9 mm pixel, 4096 X 4096
ASA DDM85 equatorial mount
Processing with PixInsight, StarTools, and Affinity Photo

This image received a Top Pick from Astrobin this morning. I used to be a pure PixInsight person and I doubt that I could have achieved such a pleasing result from PI by itself. These days, I use PI only for preprocessing. The hard stuff is done entirely in StarTools. Thank you Ivo!

Russ