2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
NGC5529 Spiral (Sc type) galaxy in Bootes.
NGC5529 has been discovered on the 1st of May 1785 by William Herschel
Magnitude: 12.1
Distance: 147 million light years
NGC5529 is a galaxy with a low rate of star birth. NGC5529 is the biggest galaxy of a group with a lot of smaller galaxies.
NGC5529 has a size of 250.000 light years, this makes it twice as big as our own Milky Way galaxy.
De distortion of one of the sides of the galaxies does not seem to be causes by the smaller galaxies. This makes it an interesting research object.
An investigation to the distorted side of the galaxy dating from 2004, with the 0.25m Great Ohio Telescope in combination with an ST8 CCD, did not result in a conclusion with regard to the dark halo that surrounds the galaxy.
http://www.phy.ohiou.edu/~tss/ASTR410/Joshi04/Paper510.html
An investigation from 2007 with the ISO IR sattelite confirms that NGC5529 has one of the biggest galaxy surrounding halo's that have been observed so far (it even reaches to about 32.000 lightyears from the disc).
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2007/41/aa7729-07.pdf
Here is a quite recent investigation from 22th april 2018, where the gas around NGC5529 has been observed in X-ray wavelengths.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/9903179.pdf
On the exposure there are many faint galaxies visible (as a reference I added a SDSS DR5 observation).
Exotic names, like IKPM1, IKPM2 and Kregel B, as well as verious PGC and MGC galaxies.
A few interesting galaxies on this exposure:
PGC2076843 is an AGN galaxy, m14.4
PGC2076761 is an AGN galaxy, m14.2
NGC5527 is a very faint NGC object, m14.4. Distance 380 million light years. Discovered on 19th April by R. J. Mitchell (an assistant of William Parsons)
From the other galaxies I could not find measurements in the Simbad database, so I welcome extra information on these galaxies.
In the book "Deepsky Wonders" of Sue French NGC5529 is discussed on page 135.
She notices that NGC5529 is a very flat galaxy. It is in the "revised flat galaxy catalogue" (Igor D. Karachentsev et al 1999), this is a compilation of 4236
galaxies that are at least 7x longer than wide. Most galaxies in this catalog are not visible in the average backyard telescope, but NGC5529 is an exception.
NGC5529 has been observed with instruments with 6" aperture, but she never observed it with a smaller telescope then her 10" Newton.
With 115x the galaxy looks like a needle. The center is a bit wider and brighter. The core is very faint.
Photographically NGC5529 is visible with a dark dust band. Sue French likes to know if somebody ever observed this visually.
Exposure date: 17th April 2018
Telescope: 200mmF5 carbon Newton on astrosystems.nl mount
Camera: ASI174MM cooled (-25C)
Autoguiding: off axis with TSOAG9 and Lodestar SXV/PHD2.6
Corrector: ES HR
Filters: Baader 1.25" R, G en B
Exposre: 14x300s R, 9x300s G en 10x300s B
Acquisition: Nebulosity4
Pre-processing: AstroPixelProcessor
Post-proccessing: PixInsight & Photoshop CS6
Imagescale: 1.13"/pixel
Thanks for watching!
Sources:
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_5529
http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=NGC%205529
https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2007/41/aa7729-07.pdf
https://forum.cosmoquest.org/showthread.php?141915-NGC-5529-FGC-1735-Rarely-seen-spectacular-galaxy
"Deepsky Wonders", Sue French
Excellent image @patrickduis,
Thank you for sharing this with all the details about the galaxy and it's surroundings 😉
I really like the way you processed this, you can see lots of faint stuff in the background !
Kind regards,
Mabula
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Thanks, I had some small issues with the guiding, what I like most, is that there are a lot of galaxies on it, that didn't have a lot of measurements in the Simbad database. The only thing that could be found were the velocities.
What is also nice to point out about this region, is that mistakes were made with the identification of NGC 5527 (right bottom of the picture).Â
NGC5527 = PGC50868 but NOT NGC5524, nor PGC50925.
NGC5527 was discovered on april 19th, 1855 by R.J. Mitchell and he described it as a magnitude 13.8 spiral galaxy (type Sbc?). He described it as "most extremely faint".Â
Common Misidentifications: PGC50925 is often misidentified as NGC 5527, and PGC 50868 as NGC5524.
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Although Dreyer credits the discovery to William Parsons, he notes that many of Rosse's nebular discoveries were actually made by one of his assistants, in this case R. J. Mitchell.
