Definitely one of the cooler looking galaxies out there! I probably should’ve shot this from darker skies to help bring out the fainter outer arms of the galaxy. Can only push them so far in processing before the background gets too noisy. There’s also a number of background galaxies in the uncropped image. Captured over 4 nights in March/April, 2022 from a Bortle 6 Zone

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Instagram

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Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 16 hours 8 minutes (Camera at -15°C, unity gain)

• L - 251x120"

• R - 78x120"

• G - 79x120"

• B - 76x120"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel per panel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• StarAlign to new Ha and Oiii stacks

• Dynamic Crop

• DynamicBackgroundExtraction 2x

Luminance Linear:

• BlurXterminator

• NoiseXterminator

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch to nonlinear

RGB Linear:

• ChannelCombination

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• Slight SCNR Green

• HSV repair

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch to nonlinear

• LRGBCombination with stretched luminance as L

• Invert > SCNR > invert to remove magentas from some stars

• shitloads of curve adjustments for lightness, contrast, hue, saturation, etc (with varying lum/star masks)

• LocalHistogramEqualization

• MLT for chrominance noise reduction

• more curves

• BlurXterminator for star sharpening

• even more curves

• Resample to 70%

• DynamicCrop in on just the galaxy

• Annotation