It's been a little while since I've posted: we had a run of pretty bad weather out in New Mexico there for a while, and then what images I was able to capture just turned out poorly.  One of them, LBN 878, looked terrific in luminance but then the color subs had weird reflections in them that made things impossible.  The other, the Flaming Star, just looked like a flaming pile of crap, no matter how I processed it--I couldn't really get it to a place that I felt was post-able.  Anyway, I finally was able to get this one done.  My scope isn't really the greatest for galaxies, and I am not adept at all at processing them, but it was fun to give it a go and finally get an image completed. 

M106 is an interesting spiral galaxy located 25 million light years away in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is pretty large, at 135,000 light years in diameter, and is also a Seyfert galaxy, which means it hosts a supermassive blackhole in its heart that is about 30 million times more massive than the Sun.  The activity of this monster releases tremendous amounts of energy, and gives us the pretty picture we see here.  I wish I could layer in x-ray or infrared, because there is a TON going on in those spectra--definitely worth doing a google search on that.  This is another one of those images that has tons of tiny galaxies lurking all over the frame, the largest of which is NGC 4217 down in the bottom left.  Without zooming in, I can see about 10.  If you actually zoom in there are tons more, which no matter how many times I do it, it's always cool. 

From a processing perspective, this one was pretty basic.  I just got a lot of data, because I didn't want to have to fight lack of data to try and bring out detail.  The core of M106 is fairly bright, so I experimented with a few different HDR techniques, all of which involved some variation of combining different stretches of luminance, some of which used HDRMT.  I wanted to reveal the detail in the core but not lose the extended nebulosity surrounding it, which was extensive.  I wish I had gotten some Ha, as I noticed some other images did a better job capturing these red streamers coming up from the core, but I'll save that for next year.  For now, I'm putting this one down and moving on.  All comments and criticisms welcome, as ever!