Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  Cigar Galaxy  ·  M 82  ·  NGC 3034
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M82- Cigar RGB + LHa, AstroDarkSky
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M82- Cigar RGB + LHa

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M82- Cigar RGB + LHa, AstroDarkSky
Powered byPixInsight

M82- Cigar RGB + LHa

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Description

A multi night project where my vision was to grab a pure RGB capture at long focal length on the detail of the galaxy plus the dynamic Ha emissions.

Ha looked decent, RGB was ok, but combining the two just... lacked a bit of pop. So I tried something new to me and manually combined Lum + Ha and used it to bring out more of the Ha detail. It is tough to balance the dynamic colors of this target with the desire to make it flashy.

Pixel scale and seeing were below average which required multiple resampling steps. Makes it a bit softer than I would have liked and using an Ha filter at F/10... ugh (and apparently noisy without longer exposures, but that's why I typically would use the refractor for narrowband with its faster F ratio :-) - but I hope its interesting using a different take on the process.

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M82- Cigar RGB + LHa, AstroDarkSky