This is a luminance image of NGC 5907 in Draco, commonly called the Splinter Galaxy and also the Knife Edge Galaxy due to its obvious thin profile as seen from our vantage point. It is a spiral galaxy with notable edge dust lane and a bright core that peeks out just a little. It is about 50 Mly distant with redshift 0.002225. Its apparent size is 12.7' x 1.4'. Its magnitude is about 10.3 with surface brightness 22.0.

My eyes were drawn to the distant cluster of galaxies on the lower left of the frame. These are actually identified as two separate clusters by SINBAD. These are too distant to be included in the PGC and are not annotated in my image. According to SINBAD one is galaxy cluster NSC J151718+560754 with redshift value approximately 0.1039. The other is NSC J151551+560911 at redshift value 0.2652. Another source listed these as being 1.3 and 3 Bly distant, respectively, which is remarkable that I could resolve any of them at all! It's possible I actually don't have any representatives of the latter one visible in my image.

The frames were taken from my light polluted suburban backyard over two surprisingly dark, clear and still nights. I decided to just capture luminance frames and try to come back later with RGB. I used 72 x 300s frames, mostly from the first night. I used PI's Deconvolution and later UnsharpMask to try to sharpen detail within reason.

I didn't like how HDRMultiscaleTransform seemed to draw out the details of the dust lane rim but at the expense of ruining the bright core. Just recently I've been advised to use PixelMath for blending in cases like this, so I took the results of HDRMT and mixed it 50% with 50% pre-HDRMT, and I liked it better.

One thing I'm not pleased with are the stars. Deconvolution reduced their sizes at the expense of pushing their saturation up. I either need to retweak this step or maybe mask them off and deal with reduction later in another way. But this is enough for now, I'll try other things next time.

I hope you enjoy, and I hope to be able to come back later and revise with RGB.