Even though I have long been intrigued by the variety of galactic shapes in this cluster, it seems like this target has always given me fits such that I just can’t get a good result. I took the luminance data for this image weeks ago, but this has been a cloudier-than-usual season so I didn’t get color to go with it until recently. And even then I had issues, as apparently my guider locked on a hot pixel after the automated meridian flip so I threw away nearly all my R and B subs. As a result, it was a huge struggle to bring out any color in this image. There was also angular misalignment between the luminance and color subs, so I had to crop far more than I wanted (I’m not a fan of cropping my data any more than I have to, even though it would often frame things better if I cropped; I like to show everything the camera caught when I can). And the final image is still a lot noisier than I like. Anyway, it’s better than my best previous (which says something about my best previous) so here it is.

Date: 1 Feb, 15-16 Mar 2019

Subject: HCG 44

Scope: AT8IN+High Point Scientific Coma Corrector

Filters: ZWO 31 mm diameter unmounted 7 nm L, R, G, B

Mount: EQ-6 (EQMOD 2.000j)+PEC

Guiding: Orion Thin Off-axis Guider + DSI IIc +PHD 2.6.5dev6 (Win 10 ASCOM)

Camera: ASI1600MM-Cool, -20 °C, Gain 139 Offset 21

Acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro 3.0.3.170

Exposure: 30x300 L, 8x120 R, 18x120 G, 7x120 B

Stacking: Deep Sky Stacker 4.1.1 (64-bit) dark+flat (no bias), κ-σ stacking with κ = 1.5.

Processing: StarTools 1.4.341: Combined L, R, G, & B in StarTools (had to convert R, G, & B to tiff first for some reason (they wouldn’t load otherwise). Cropped, wiped, developed, HDR optimized, and used the color module. Deconvoluted, untrack denoised. The did the same treatment to the L by itself and to the RGB. I ended up layering the processed RGB on top of the LRGB as a color layer in Photoshop. Attempted some more denoising and used increase star color.