Phew! This was by far my most challenging image to date. I've been meaning to try my first galax for a while, and finally, here it is
To start off, it took 3 months for my Optolong L-Pro filter to arrive. Half of this time it was sitting on customs, but the customs just forgot to mention it to me.
Once I had it, it took another month for the clouds to finally go away for a while.
I collected around 16 hours of images across three nights, and problems with the wind, meridian flips and focus on my guiding scope allowed me to leverage only less than half of those precious light frames.
Then, there was the stacking challenge: something on my flats for 2' just didn't work. I could only get relatively good stretches once I decided to completely ignore the 2' frames and stack it all over using only the 3' ones.
Still had to invest a good 4 hours on Pixinsight + Topaz to process it, and suddenly it's already Sunday night.
But if you ask me, I think it was totally worth the effort ;)
Hope you enjoy it, and clear skies!
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