M81 - Bode's Galaxy & M82 - Cigar Galaxy

Back in early march I set up M81 & M82 as a late night target after some of my Orion targets set around midnight and then promptly forgot that I had configured that sequence. This is the results of that lapse in memory.

Total integration time ended up at ~15 hours split over L-R-G-B. I was very happy with the amount of dust that I was able to pull out of the background given all of this was taken in my B6/B7 backyard shooting into the light dome.

451x60s L = 7.5 hours

149x60s R = 2.5 hours

149x60s G = 2.5 hours

148x60s B = 2.5 hours

Total = 14.95 hours

Image acquisition done in N.I.N.A.

Preprocessing done in PixInsight using WBPP for each night separately

Final stacks made with DrizzleIntegration using the VarK=1.5 Kernel, scale 2x

Post-Processing

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Luminance

* SuperLum created by integrating R, G, B, & L with no rejection, noise evaluation for weighing

* DynamicCrop

* DynamicBackgroundExtraction - 3 rounds with focus on large scale gradients first, then finer gradients after

* Deconvolution using EZDeconvolution

* IntegerResample to downscale back to original resolution

* TGVDenoise & MultiscaleMedianTransform using EZDenoise

* HistogramTransformation to bring in black point

* HistogramTransformation for stretch

* HDRMultiscaleTransformation to HDR the galaxy cores

Color

* DynamicBackgroundExtraction on R, G, & B channels

* ChannelCombination

* BackgroundNeutralization

* PhotometricColorCalibration

* SCNR to bring down green

* ChannelCombination to integrate L

* Curves for saturation

* LRGBCombination with Chrominance Denoise enabled for color NR

* Curves for days

* More curves

* Some more curves

* MorphologicalTransformation for star reduction

* Some light LHE on background to bring out dust contrast a bit

* HistogramTransformation to bring in black point a bit

* Crop & Rotate 90 degrees

* MultiscaleMedianTransform for some additional background noise reduction

* UnsharpMask to bring out a bit more sharpness in the galaxies

* Curves for color, contrast, & saturation

* ColorSaturation to bring out the blues a bit

* ACDNR to reduce chrominance noise that was brought out by all the curves