Originally, this project was just a 'time-killer' for the Meade 70mm.   Sitting at 350mm, it's not what you'd consider a scope good for galaxies.  At the end of the night, when most the nebulae got too low for the horizon, I pointed the scope at M101 and let her go until dawn.   I had nearly forgot about the data set honestly.   The weather hasn't been super cooperative lately, and imaging time h as become a premium unless the intended target is clouds. 

Well, the data sat for a few weeks before I even remembered it, and to my surprise, i had over 27 hours of data.   Unfortunately I hadn't built up a strong luminance set, so that data was left out.   However, the RGB data was already strong enough that I decided to process this image.    The struggle for me was creating an image that showed off all these tiny galaxies without creating alot of noise, or increasing the background level.  I picked one small galaxy that's quickly become my favorite, and based all my image processing around this target.  

This is PGC 2492787.    A very small, dim galaxy, and such a challenge for a 70mm scope, the Meade Quad did a pretty amazing job bringing this out.   The little spiral arms make it stand out among the rest.    I can't find much on this galaxy, but the german reference I found claimed it was 1.6 Billion light years away....    Hopefully someone can chime in on this, because it seems incredibly far.


My hope is with some more luminance time, I can bring out an even stronger signal, especially for such a wide field image.   Unfortunately AB's plate solving algo doesn't seem to want to label all the PGC galaxies like it should.   There are at least 100 PGC shown in this image, probably more, but theres no way I'm counting them all.


Lessons learned with this project:

You don't need luminance to produce a quality image.
I really wished I had a luminance stack for this image, however.  It would have come out even better.
Drizzled data when you're undersampled is a truly amazing tool.    It felt very much like I was processing full frame data.

For now, I have opted to keep the drizzled version uploaded, instead of downsampling for those that wish to peek all the data.  As always, I have a slight bit of tilt in my imaging train that rears its ugly head in an image like this... but honestly, I'm still ecstatic about the quality of this image.