Galaxy season is a tough pull for a widefield scope such as the Esprit 100.   At 550mm, the Sunflower Galaxy occupies a fairly small portion of the frame.   Thankfully, the Esprit 100 is slightly undersampled, which allows me to take advantage of drizzle integration to enhance some detail.   Combine that with new deconvolution tools such as BlurX, and you get really improved details in the smaller background galaxies as well.   Unfortunately, the last two nights of imaging were under some of the worst seeing I've come across from my backyard to date.    A part of me wanted to just wait longer and try again later for sharper data, but the other half of me was anxious to produce an image.

Pushing the signal to expose the faint arms of M63 is seriously a tough balance.  A balance between baked and tasteful.  Go too far and it looks unnatural.     Try to keep it natural and you no longer see the arms.  It's just gotta be somewhere in the middle and you have to accept that it wont be natural looking.  To create this image, particularly the luminance, I created three seperate luminance stacks, drizzled, then combined into a pseudo RGB image to take full advantage of the new denoise tool, DeepSNR.    An extremely powerful tool, but in its current state needs an image with 3 distinct noise profiles to work.   By the manual, it only works on RGB.    Creating three separate stacks of the same data allows us to kinda cheat this system and take advantage of the power tool that DeepSNR is.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy.  This image is re-scaled slightly off sampling, at 70% of the drizzle scale.    The reason for that was to keep some of the small background galaxy details in the image, which were lost when resampling to native resolution.    My only self critique of this image, and something that I wish I could fix was stretching the stars seperately.    Unfortunately using starless tools, even on an image like this, still tends to take the little background galaxies with it.    To restretch the stars, less to match the image resolution would unfortunately mean performing the same actions/reductions on those smaller galaxies, and I refuse to hide them.    So we stick with the fat stars in my galaxy images...sadly.   Another small fault of the scope actually, is the Esprits tend to leave a slightly purple fringe on stars.   It can be noticed in this image.  Normally I have a process to fix this, but for some reason It was not working on this data set without making the stars extra crunchy.



Just for kicks, here's the whole frame (I rotated mid project) with the 'stars' removed, revealing all the galaxies in the background: