NGC 3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy or Sarah's Galaxy is an unbarred spiral galaxy about 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. Along with M65 and M66, NGC 3628 forms the Leo Triplet, a small group of galaxies in the constellation Leo (
https://www.astrobin.com/ej7lq8/). Its most conspicuous feature is the broad and obscuring band of dust located along the outer edge of its spiral arms, effectively transecting the galaxy to the view from Earth.. *Wikipedia
I captured this image from a dark site near Chicago, IL over three nights. It is composed of 130 X 60sec RGB and 172 x 120sec Lum subs, taken one after the other for sky background consistency and dithered for noise management. I had to discard many subs due to poor guiding caused by wind and bad seeing so I am tempted to spend another night on it to get a better color balance and definition of the dust bands, weather permitting.
Stacked and calibrated with darks, flats, and dark flats using with PixInsight's WBP script.
PixInsight workflow:
Stretched RGB channels with EZ Soft Stretch Script
Combined RGB with LRGB Combination process
Extracted L from RGB image
Reapplied L to RGB image with 0.400 Saturation X 2 times for color
Processed Lum Manually
Stretched with Histogram Transformation and Curves Transformation
Removed stars with StarNet2
Restacked Lum subs with the best FWHM stars
Extracted stars and applied to main Lum stack
Automatic Background Extraction
BlurXTerminator
EZ Star Reduction Script
DarkStructureEnhance Script
NoiseXTerminator
Applied L to RGB image with Chrominance Noise Reduction
Photoshop workflow:
Cropped to remove stacking artifacts
Camera Raw Filter
Color Mixer: Hue and Saturation adjustments
Final Histogram adjustments
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