During the early winter months I was nursing a failing LAN socket on my backyard observatory controller, a Lunatico Dragonfly, which had otherwise worked tirelessly for years.  After some great advice from Jaime at Lunatico, I posted the Dragonfly to Spain for a repair and upgrade to the RPi board.  It returned in time for me to tidy up my wiring and electronics in a re-purposed cupboard and take advantage of a stable spell of weather in the UK and gather a deep dataset for the spectacular M106.

I have imaged this galaxy both wide from home and remotely from my shared, owned, self-installed, self-operated rigs in Spain with Steve Milne and we have tried to capture the Ha jets of the active galaxy core; being nearby and presenting such a pleasing angle I enthusiastically trained my William Optics FLT132 and Atik One 9.0 on it and settled in to dedicate the weather window to a UK-based study.  I have been lucky to have moonless period with good seeing and cool evening temperatures and so have gathered 48 x 300s each R, G and B; 36 x 600s Lum and 15 x 1200s Ha (5nm).

I have used the Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch process in PI and have found myself experimenting and using a mixture of both the "colour" mode and "RGB" mode.  Many thanks to David Payne and Mike Cranfield for their efforts creating the script and accessible tutorials, (see forum post here ).

Processing was pretty straightforward other than adding in the Ha data, I always seem to have to experiment with the process to get the best results.  I still have yet to devote time to researching PS techniques.  The final image is a slight crop.

Being an image from my backyard in a semi-rural location at the edge of reasonably sized town in Devon, I am very pleased to see the level of detail acquired by my trusty 5" refractor, patience and a deep dataset.  What a lucky lad to have the weather just as my obs is back up and running, even with a short hiatus when the the local time zone changed to DST and I had to wake in the night to change settings and re-commence the imaging.

From Wikipedia: "M106 has a water vapor megamaser (the equivalent of a laser operating in microwave instead of visible light and on a galactic scale) that is seen by the 22-GHz line of ortho-H2O that evidences dense and warm molecular gas. Water masers are useful for observing nuclear accretion disksin active galaxies. The water masers in M106 enabled the first case of a direct measurement of the distance to a galaxy, thereby providing an independent anchor for the cosmic distance ladder.[10][11] M106 has a slightly warped, thin, almost edge-on Keplerian disc which is on a subparsec scale. It surrounds a central area with mass 4 × 107M⊙.[12] It is one of the largest and brightest nearby galaxies, similar in size and luminosity to the Andromeda Galaxy.[13] The supermassive black hole at the core has a mass of (3.9±0.1)×107 M☉.[14] M106 has also played an important role in calibrating the cosmic distance ladder. Before, Cepheid variables from other galaxies could not be used to measure distances since they cover ranges of metallicities different from the Milky Way's. M106 contains Cepheid variables similar to both the metallicities of the Milky Way and other galaxies' Cepheids. By measuring the distance of the Cepheids with metallicities similar to our galaxy, astronomers are able to recalibrate the other Cepheids with different metallicities, a key fundamental step in improving quantification of distances to other galaxies in the universe."