The Antennae Galaxies have been on my to do list ever since I first saw them. For the first couple of years I was in a location that didn't have access to the southern sky that far south. Then the next two years I missed the window of opportunity because I wasn't paying close enough attention. That might have happened this year had one of my teammates not suggested it. It's a low target for a mid-latitude northern hemisphere telescope but definitely a worthwhile one. 

This was also our first target using NINA on the SRO scope. I've been using NINA at home since before I moved so more than two years. Thankfully the team was open to exploring whether NINA would work for us and so far the answer is a resounding "yes". It's only deficiency is the lack of automatable sky flats but I'm told this is coming in NINA 3. For now we can cope with getting sky flats manually.

The only odd thing is that our bin2 RGB frames are coming not coming out half resolution of our bin1 L frames. They are slightly less than half resolution and different amounts in each dimension. And, curiously, WBPP didn't scale them to the same size as the L though I was able to remedy that by a manual star alignment step. That's something I need to look into.

We gathered as much data as we could before the moon got too bright and ended up with a bit over 21 hours. Processing was as follows:

RGB:
channel combination
star align to L
dynamic crop
DBE
SPCC
blueXterminator
noiiseXterminator
GHS (GHS, linear, GHS)
LRGBCombination in L
starXterminator (extracting unscreened stars)
HDRMT
LHE
MLT sharpening (very very mild)
Used RangeSelection and CloneStamp to create a mask of the tidal tails and then used GHS to brighten the tidal tails.
Used GAME to mask off the star halo of the bright star up and to the right of the galaxies and then histogram transformation to reduce the halo
pixel math in stars

L:
dynamic crop
DBE
blurXterminator
noiseXterminator
GHS (GHS, linear, GHS)

stars:
unsharp mask (extremely mild sharpening)