M104. Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo (weine006)

M104. Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo

During my eclipse trip to Texas for the eclipse on April 8, I planned to do nighttime imaging of southerly targets (like M104) as the location was 15 degrees south of my home site. And I was hoping for some really dark skies in the Texas Hill Country. Well, the eclipse was almost a complete bust--barely could see totality through thin clouds. But on April 5th, the skies were clear and the SQM reading of 21.4 was a whole magnitude darker than my home site. For the first time I saw the zodiacal light in the west!

But there was one big problem. Wind. Endless wind--gusts to 30 mph. At home I would have packed it in. But I didn't want to see miss out on imaging in such dark skies. With a TEC 140 refractor, even on a sturdy AP 1100 mount and HD Losmandy tripod, the wind buffeted the scope endlessly. Calm conditions and pointing at 30 degrees altitude would normally yield a guide error of 0.35-0.5 RMS, now it was 1.5-2! I could see egg-shaped stars on every sub even when I decreased the interval from 120 sec to 60 seconds. As the subs accumulated I wondered whether I was wasting my time imaging. But I decided to ignore the computer and spent hours doing naked-eye visual, checking off all the stars (all seven stars of Ursa Minor, Alcor, Melotte 111, Omega Centauri globular, etc) I'd never seen at home.

At 3 am the clouds rolled in and I stopped, leaving the RGB subs on the computer thinking I might never process it. But two weeks later I was curious to see how much processing magic I could squeeze out of the data and the results exceeded my expectations. Thanks to pixel rejection in stacking and BlurXTerminator!
Normally I use the default Pixinsight WBPP PSF Signal weighting algorithm but I figured that with such dark skies, signal was not the problem so I made a custom algorithm with more weighting on FWHM and Eccentricity as these would be most affected by the windy conditions.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9739277
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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M104. Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo

M104. Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo

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M104. Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo

M104. Sombrero Galaxy in Virgo

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