My second target for Galaxy Season. From reference images I was struck by the distinctive red jets spiraling out from the core of this galaxy. The Ha jet ended up being my goal for this project. I'd say that even with just the Quadband data, the jet was starting to show itself. However, they were still rather faint which led me to adding in Ha from my dual narrowband data. You can see in edits C and D that the Ha jet does show up in the quadband crop in but needs the Ha information to really stand out. I'm quite happy with how this image turned out. There's a lot of little galaxies scattered around the area such as the edge on one in the bottom left and one on the bottom right with a second disk inside a main luminosity. There's also the group of orangish objects to the just lower right of M106 itself. I can't wait to edit this again in the future once I get Pixinsight. 

There are 4 versions here:

1. Quadband + Ha from Dual narrowband
2. Quadband alone
3. Quadband M106 zoom in with jet indicator
4. Quadband + Ha M106 zoom in with jet indicator

For processing this time around, I learned a lot from doing more reading around on stretching and CC and tried to employ them this time around. This was mainly because my previous images of galaxies ended up lacking a lot of the blue that should naturally be there.

Processing:

1. ASTAP Stack with Flats, Darks, Flat Darks (DNB and Quadband separately)
2. GraXpert crop and background removal for Quadband data.
3. Siril
1. PCC
2. Green noise removal
3. GHS x2
4. Linear blackpoint adjustment
5. CC with background black as a reference
6. Save fits


4. Affinity Photo
1. Curves to get the background lower again
2. High pass very light
3. HSL Boost red, blue
4. Quadband version is done


5. HaOiii DNB
6. Siril
1. Crop
2. Split channels R, G, B
3. Pixel Math to get Monochrome Ha = 0.8 R + 0.07 G + 0.02 B
4. GHS x2
5. Linear blackpoint adjustment
6. Save fits


7. Affinity photo
1. Curves background suppression
2. Subtract Quadband R from Ha layer
3. Mask out everything but the Ha Jets
4. Convert group to add and add to Quadband


8. Done!

Some lessons learned, there are sometimes regions of space that are kinda bad to the MC Duo. Since my FoV is very small with the Esprit at F7, there are times where I could not find a guide star with the HaOiii dual narrowband. For M106 this led to a bunch of frustrations since the Ha could not track when it crosses the meridian. This happened sometimes and would waste the rest of the night as the ASIAIR would not move on to the next target. I also had some focusing issues in HaOiii but I presume that is the ASIAIR issue. Quadband was perfectly fine in both scenarios. 

I also can't believe it never crossed my mind before to use CC. I always leveled out my colors manually in Affinity but I could've just used PCC and CC in Siril to get an accurate calibration. I guess it's time to get the blues out of my other broadband images.

Edit: 2024/04/17
Tried out PixInsight, BXT, and NXT.