Background:
This image has been a goal of mine for many years since starting astrophotography; I had attempted the region with a wider scope once before and was unimpressed with the lack of detail in both the galaxies and the IFN - I figured the only path forward was going to be sinking an admittedly ridiculous amount of time into the region. After two months of acquisition, 150 hours seemed like a reasonable stopping point. This is my deepest integration on a single area to date and with the abundance of H-alpha signal and detail in the IFN I can say I don't regret a single minute of integration. Now after two weeks of processing, tweaking, and refining, I am happy to share the results with you all!

Processing:
This image presented several struggles, primarily being the extreme dynamic range between the very delicate IFN and the bright core of the two target galaxies as well as the matter of the ultra-faint Ha signal far off of the plane of M82. Using my technique for continuum subtraction and narrowband addition (Advanced Narrowband Combination — Night Photons) I separated the Ha signal and re-incorporated it back into the processed LRGB image, this allowed me to have the most possible control over the appearance and distribution of narrowband signal in the final image. For the high dynamic range processing, I have been experimenting with new multiscale processing techniques (which I hope to write another guide about soon!) which maximize the available structures in the data without causing the image to look overprocessed or flattened. Most importantly, though, for this image I have taken an abundance of time, really pushing my own patience to the limit. I have found that spending an additional day, even if the tweaks I make only improve the image by 1% really does add up. Hopefully I can continue to exercise this patience into the future and further improve my process.

As the focus of the image really is the galaxies, I reluctantly chose to publish the main revision as a cropped image, leaving the full resolution field (with only stacking artifacts and the like cropped out) as a secondary revision. With that said, there are some incredibly cool features in the wider swath of IFN that I just couldn't help but show off. Here is a heavily stretched luminance image of the whole field, showing much of the complex features of the greater molecular cloud: