Sadly this did not turn out as hoped. With clear skies a rarity this spring, I chose a rather mediocre night to wheel out my SCT and have a go at a classic spring galaxy.
M106, lies 22 million LY from us and shows off a distorted core, from local interactions, punctuated by dust lanes, star clouds and starburst regions...although not in this image. It seems I forgot to subtract the 17mm (!) of backspace created by my Altair filter holder from the optical train. I suspect this is what has blurred the detail and given rise to wonky stars.
Captured in APT, aligned and stacked in Nebulosity (throwing away 50% (2 hours) of data in the process), processed in Siril, sharpened and colour saturated in Startools, with final star reduction and unsharp mask in Nebulosity - I have thrown everything at this to produce an almost presentable image. A train crash compared with my previous efforts at
f10 with my SCT and
f7 using my refractor. Now to reduce the optical train by 17mm.
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