I had 2 perfect nights to capture M106, a beautiful spiral galaxy in Canis Venati of magnitude 8,38 and 17'x7' across.
M106 is about 23 million lightyears away from us and 125.000 lightyears across. Its galactic center is a massive 40 million sun masses heavy black hole that is also a strong radio emitter.
Its spiral arms are quite busy with active star generation areas in bright red, as the galaxy is currently in a star burst phase.
I was lucky to acquire 13h of data in 180seconds subs for LRGB and 300s for Ha.
The processing was changed from my previous approach as to
- overhauling my flats process to use longer exposures and cleaning up my mots and no longer mixing up channels (thanks
@JanErik and
@George Hatfield )
- acquire Luminance (thanks for the guidance,
@Gary Imm)
- LinearFit all channels so that L or Ha don't overturn RGB
- GadientXpert for gradient removal
- color calibration with SPCC (Thanks for the steer
@Dcolam- processing stars and galaxy in RGB and not seperating them
- integrating Ha into RGB using ContinuumSubtraction and COmbineHaIntoRGB, both from Toolbox
- BlurXTerminator and some very tiny NoiseXterminator to protect signal in the faint noise (thanks for your coaching
@Jon Rista )
- EZ Softstretch (what a great tool, as GHS and HistogramTrafo still kill me ...)
- HDRMultiscaleTransformation for the Luminance channel (advice from
@Geoff )
- merging stretched L and RGBH with LRGBCombination
- some fine tuning using curves
I hope you like the result :-)
Images of intermediate stages:
- RGB from gradient removed and SPCC to H continuum subtracted and RGBH merged
Luminance from raw via gradient removal, BlurX + NoiseX and Stretched
RGBH stretched and merged with stretched luminance
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