A couple of galaxies and an interesting field in Draco... NGC5907 is a nearly edge on spiral located about 50 million light years from us. According to Universguide.com diameter of the galaxy is about 150,000 light years making it quite large. Also, near the bottom of the image you will find a bluish spiral, PGC 54267 or UGC 9769 which is also approximately 50 million light years away and likely has a diameter of about 37,000 light years.

I wanted to try to capture the intricate and faint star streams that make The Splinter Galaxy unique. R. Jay GaBany has produced a marvelous image showing this. But the best I could get was a hint of the brightest portion of one of the loops. I did a good amount of integration trying to bring this out and intended to keep at it until I captured it but we have received exactly zero cooperation from Mother Nature for quite a while here in Arizona. In any case, I stretched it as hard as I felt I could and this is the result. Not sure if I like it or hate it.

I thought a lot about star reduction in this image, especially since I stretched it hard, and came to the conclusion that I wanted to do just a very small amount of this. I suspected there were a lot of things in the field that were not stars and I hoped to preserve those. Accordingly, when I set up the Advance Plate Solving, I set it to solve for quasars and PGCs and was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of objects that were solved.

With regard to color, I have not lately been able to get the saturation of color I would like and I am not sure exactly why. But in this case, I think the color saturation level is likely fairly realistic even if it is not that spectacular. I have recently, after a little back and forth with one of our superb colleagues, abandoned the parametric color calibration routine in favor of simple color calibration and I think I like the result much better.

Anyhow, running out of time on this one for adding more integration time, especially during the monsoon season. I hope you like this one, comments and criticism always welcome. CS and good health!