The southern hemisphere gets the Magellanic Clouds and we northerners get the Draco Dwarf Galaxy. It doesn't seem fair! smile

This anemic little galaxy has almost no dust so it's even hard to recognize it as a galaxy. It looks more like star cluster in an image and processing it was certainly more like a star cluster.

We actually took about 4 hours of h-alpha for this but I didn't end up using it because there was nothing there. Curiously, though, the "swoosh" that was pretty prominent on the red channel didn't show up at all on the h-alpha so I don't know what it is. Given the Draco Dwarf Galaxy is about 260,000 light years away the "swoosh" seems likely to be in our galaxy but I don't see it in other images. It's a bit of a mystery to me as to what it is. I see it in about half of the red subs though they aren't grouped together so it wasn't some local light source or cloud reflection. It's always in the same spot on the frame. It's there on one sub, gone the next and then back. My guess is that it's either some local red light source that's getting into the optics (it shows up only on R and L but nowhere else) or it's real and sky conditions only let us see it on some subs. I can say with complete authority that I don't know. smile

I don't see anything obvious on the subs that would make me think local light source but the complete lack of it showing up in other images makes me suspicious - especially since it doesn't show up on the h-alpha subs. If anyone has any ideas about what it might be, let me know!

There is some broadband "haze" in the star field that passes for a galaxy, but it's not clear to me if that's glare from the foreground star or just the faint glow of the smaller, not resolvable stars in the galaxy. Perhaps a bit of both.

Processing:
L:
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RGB
Channel combination
BXT
GC
SPCC
Delinear script
LRGB Combination (addin in L)
Curves (contrast, color, saturation)