This circumpolar pair is a common stopover location for me to image while waiting on targets to rise above my power lines. This time around, I dedicated more images to this pair to try and get some color out of them before I switch scopes for the season. Even with all of the hours and the quadband light pollution filter, it does not seem like I was able to pull out the rich blues from this stack. I'll need to get more integration in the future to overcome the local light pollution.
To the top left we can spot the Garland Galaxy and on the bottom left we can spot NGC 2976. There are also some other galaxies to the bottom of the image and some faint structures that show up like the plume above M81.
For processing, this time around I did some reading on color preservation and gave a manually entered Arcsinh100 a try. I feel like I'm missing something there since I need to relevel the black point everytime I use it. I'll have to play around with it more.
Processing steps:
- ASTAP Blink and Stack
- GraXpert background removal
- Bring into Affinity Photo 2
- Half Arcsinh100, Black point adjustment with curves, Half Arcsinh100
- Channel Mixer boost red 10% and blue 20%
- Vibrance
- Clarity on the galaxies
- Levels Adjustment
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