Galaxy Season is in full force and I'm still waiting for my longer FL APO to get shipped.
So here's M106 in a larger field with 550mm FL.
I wish I had rotated the sensor 90° before starting this project, again I was too lazy to shoot new flats.
When I started out with this galaxy, I had trouble finding good guide stars (with a 200mm guide scope, can you believe it).
After switching to an OAG, this problem was solved for good. Guiding ran perfectly fine then. While dialing in the focus of the OAG during the day, I changed the gain of my main camera to 0 to roughly find focus first and forgot to change it back in the evening session. This left me with gain 0 subs from the best night of the bunch.
For the L channel, this was no issue. Even at 60s gain 0 the subs are sky-limited. However, my 300s 6nm Hα subs showed significant read noise issues. I stacked them anyways since I was mainly looking for the continuum-subtracted parts which are fine. The sky background in the Hα stack does not contribute to the final image.
I was glad I could pull out M106's Hα jet with my short FL and 100mm aperture.
Processing galaxies is still a mystery to me. It's a totally different beast than large nebulae.
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