A really hard fought image! I intended to get started on this all the way back in March, but high winds at my dark site completely grounded my Newtonian. Then I went to Ohio in April for the Eclipse, so did no dark shooting then. I live in city light pollution in Phoenix, so mostly don’t bother with broadband photography from here—for broadband plus narrowband I like to have the broadband done first and then add on Ha.
But with the way the timing worked out, I ended up having to take the H alpha first and hope I’d get a chance to actually shoot a real image of it from the dark eventually. By the time May rolled around, this region was really only shootable for half the night so I was lucky to get two nights there to do LRGB and ended up with 6.5 hours of usable data.
The 42 hours of Ha needed an aggressive cleanup due to reflections using MSGR, and were added in via continuum subtraction (
https://nightphotons.com). Stretching the galaxies was done with Uri Darom’s (
https://astrouri.com) fantastic iHDR script. Noise reduction with DeepSNR, and star reduction using blurxterminator and a Bill Blanshan pixel math icon.
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