Markarian's Chain (Chris Kagy)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Virgo (Vir) · Contains: M 84 · M 86 · NGC 4374 · NGC 4387 · NGC 4388 · NGC 4402 · NGC 4406 · NGC 4407 · NGC 4425 · NGC 4435 · NGC 4436 · NGC 4438 · NGC 4440 · NGC 4458 · NGC 4461 · NGC 4473 · NGC 4477

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Markarian's Chain

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Markarian's Chain

I took this from my Bortle 8/9 back yard over 3 months between cloudy nights. It is ~2h each R, G, B (180s exposures each) and ~11.5h Lum.(60s exposures each). Given the number of lum frames, calibration/stacking was going to be time consuming, so I tried a different workflow.
1. Calibrate all subs using WBPP, applying darks, flats, cosmetic correction and registration only.
2. I went into the logs and noted the frame used for calibration, which I copied out to my processing directory.
3. Run Fast Integration on the cosmetically corrected lum data, using the reference frame from #3. I made sure to have the FI process generate drizzle data. This process finished the ~680 lum files in roughly 8 minutes.
4. Run Drizzle Integration (2x, 0.8 drop size) on the lum data. No way to speed this up - it was an overnight thing.
5. Combine the RGB, SPCC, BXT (correct only), and then use Star Alignment to upscale the RGB to the Lum.
6. Continue processing as usual to extract stars, stretch RGB, nudge colors up in saturation, do full processing of Lum for detail, and combine the two.

I got lazy with my flats and paid the price - I had to create a synthetic flat to correct some donuts I could have avoided with better practice.

This is far from the best Markarian's image out there, but it served as a good testbed for using FI to get a drizzled, upscaled lum file in half the time it would normally take.

NOVAC
"Simply Stellarvue"

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