With the endless cloud cover, I decided to edit this image early.
This is a view of M101 and its neighbors. The view includes some other galaxies including some edge-on ones on the left and NGC 5474 on the right.
The view is not that good of a fit for my scope, camera, and focal length but I figured I should capture something while my scope was running overnight. Since the other targets I'm going for earlier in the night set around midnight or the early morning, M101 ended up being visited later in the morning. This usually led to clouds or fog or the sun itself rising ruining a lot of images. Next time around, I might go for 3 min to 5 min subframes to reduce the number of frames I'll have to manually search for cloud smears.
I originally wanted to do a HaRGB image. However, I realized I had not finished collecting nearly enough data in dual band for the Ha (3 hours). I may eventually add in the Ha data to this image when I get more (around 8-10 hours at minimum). Going with only Quadband data for this attempt, the editing approach I took for this was heavily inspired by one of the forum topics going on right now where some of the comments mentioned going simpler with the editing. I found that editing galaxies ended up way harder than I originally expected. I expected to find more color or detail as I did some stretching but it was probably washed out with my local light pollution and lower resolution.
Overall, I will definitely need to revisit M101 at a closer view and with a much deeper image.
Steps:
- Blink, prune, and stack in ASTAP
- GraXpert gradient/background removal
- Affinity photo 2 edits
- 4x Curves to stretch
- Channel Mixer to boost red 10% and blue 20%
- Vibrance and saturation increase
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