Bill Williams: 14.5″ RCOS: dust-extincted galaxy IC342 in Camelopardalis.
When you look at my [pictured] face-on spiral galaxy image, it is normal to ask “where are the blue spiral arms”? Didn’t you collect blue data? Don’t you know how to color balance after all these years?! They are there in reality but the blue light is absorbed by so much dust in our galaxy in the direction of this galaxy approx. 11 million light years away that they are all but hidden (in the “zone of avoidance”). Estimates are that this galaxy is 2.4 magnitudes (~6x) brighter than it appears because of this local Milky Way dust extinction. Check out the deep IC342 image taken atop Kitt Peak, Arizona with the 4-meter scope showing almost no blue! My image was taken with our 14.5-inch RCOS and Apogee camera and consists of 3 hours of luminance (1×1) and 2 hours each of red, green, and blue (2×2) into the teeth of the Chiefland light dome. This is a crop of the total image which is almost twice as big. If you zoom in on the image (click to zoom) you will discover the tiny barred spiral galaxy near the center bottom sandwiched between a massive H-alpha region and a bright orange star! This is IRAS 03443+6754 which is, of course, also heavily reddened by dust as pointed out by Adam Block in his image of this area.. My wife Sandy says she wasn’t aware of my new passion for dust until now. To that end, she suggests I grab a vacuum and get more familiar with our local dust! Now this sounds to me like a real “zone of avoidance”!