Messier 101 (HaRGB) (Linda)

Messier 101 (HaRGB)

Link: https://lindasastronomyadventures.space/2021/05/04/m101/

This is my longest integration to date, not that it was intended to be. However, with galaxy season upon us I didn't have a wealth of suitable targets for my 80mm refractor. So when the few clear nights came it was easy to say, "let's get more on M101." Plus, I was able to add in some data from my old location from 2020 so some was collected in Bortle 7 (the 2020 data) and some was collected in Bortle 4 (the 2021 data).

For some reason a fair amount of the subs wouldn't register. I haven't investigated this yet but as the total loss wasn't very high I just let them go. I may go back and try to figure out the problem later. That would push the total integration time up a few hours.

I tried something different (at least for me) when processing this. First, I used drizzle integration which I don't often use.

For the RGB

Dynamic Crop

DBE

MLT noise reduction

Channel Combination

PCC

Histogram Transformation

LHE

For the H-alpha:

Dynamic Crop

DBE

MLT noise reduction

Histogram Transformation

Starnet

LHE

Then I used NRGBCombination to combine the starless h-alpha with the RGB and that worked surprisingly well!

The I finished up with:

TGV Denoise

Adam Block's star reduction

AdvSharpening

Curves (color and contrast)

The biggest challenge was starnet on the h-a data. A lot of those blogs look like stars so I had to mask off the galaxy to prevent starnet from dangling it but that meant I had to clone stamp out some actual h-a stars that were inside the mask. Overall it worked fairly well.

I was really happy with how much detail the little refractor could gather. I'm hoping to purchase a larger refractor later this year but this little telescope has never left me feeling like it hasn't given me its all.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4470187
PixInsight job	0JWT3A0MSYT4E4FNT0V4QLZFPPSBMAF0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	14h02m50s.872
RA (top/left)	13h58m33s.997
RA (top/right)	14h07m05s.400
RA (bottom/right)	14h07m13s.416
RA (bottom/left)	13h58m31s.270

Dec (center)	+54°23′34″.81
Dec (top/left)	+53°56′17″.15
Dec (top/right)	+53°55′43″.29
Dec (bottom/right)	+54°50′17″.61
Dec (bottom/left)	+54°50′50″.67

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