My first galaxy effort of the season.
The weather has been rough and I was only able to capture 13.6 hours of 4 minute exposures this month because of terrible seeing, clouds, and snow and rain. Maybe we'll have less wildfire smoke this summer then?
I feel like I am finally dialing in my C9.25 after upgrading last summer from my 8SE OTA. I also traded out my Starizona SCT Corrector II for their
SCT Corrector IV which has much better color and correction, and this is the first image where I have my back-focus dialed in. Collimation could always be improved, but I am employing a few new tricks with that as well.
Using an OAG is often a substantial challenge. I am 2x binned on my guide camera, and as far as I know am I doing all of the right stuff, but in this case I had to nudge the scope around to find a good guide-star. This wasn't a substantial issue because I intended to crop anyway, but it certainly wasted some valuable imaging time trying to solve that problem.
This is my second implementation of deconvolution which works remarkably well on the small structures in galaxies. I'd be a bit lost without being able to refer back to
@Adam Block 's Fundamentals tutorials since I tend to shoot an image every month or so. This is just enough time to mostly forget how to do any new process in Pixinsight.
I really wanted to capture some detail in the three primary smaller galaxies surrounding the big one, and I feel like I was pretty successful with that in spite of having less data than I had hoped for.
Galaxies are fun, but I miss the fall nebulae already...
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