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Title: M51, a year of PI -learning later

Description: I uploaded as a revision, even though there is technically 18 minutes of additional data here. Given the release of BlurXTerminator, I was motivated to revisit M51, an under-sampled image from 2021. The initial processing was filled with challenges (undersampled, walking noise, sub-optimal guiding, different cameras, etc). I thought it would be interesting and go back and reprocess taking advantage of some the additions to PI's processing capabilities but also with my own improved ineptitude. This is image is far from good and I look forward to collecting a much larger sample size this coming year, but here are the changes that impacted the reprocessing over the original:
1. Incorporation of data from another camera, adding in @ 18 minutes of additional signal. I had no earthly idea how to do that a year ago
2. WBPP as it exists today as opposed to 2021 - a better Script. obviously took the Registered images from two cameras and ran Image Integration as a separate step (again, no earthly idea how to do that a year ago)
3. Much more aggressive cropping early to hone in on the area of interest - not trying to squeeze out every last star or DSO
4. Better use of Canon Banding Script - figuring out how to protect highlights and titrate the amount of correction
5. Much more thoughtful DBE regarding placement and number of samples
6. Spectrophotometric Color Calibration - pretty impressive difference from PCC
7. First use of Russ Crowman's BlurXTerminator - I oversharpened it on the Galaxy (not realized until late in processing), but really improved the stars over the original version; very powerful and look forward to learning how to use on better data
8. Russ Crowman's NoiseXTerminator in both linear and non-linear stage - I keep going back and forth with other methods of noise reduction in both phases including masked MLT among others, and I really like the simplicity of this process, especially as I learn more how to use the Detail slider to titrate the correction.
9. Separating stars from rest of image in linear phase using StarXTerminator - stretch both separately and recombine using PixelMath in the non-linear stage.
10. Trying not to over-process at every turn - still a challenge, especially with sub-optimal data.

In any case, interesting how looking at processing differences from one year to the next with similar data as a PI-newbie morphs into a PI-pretender!

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