Since I bought my Explore Scientific 127ED APO I didn't have much opportunity to do some imaging. I bought this telescope mainly for the galaxy season and did some tests. This image is the second project I did on the scope. To get the reach I needed, I paired it with the ZWO ASI 183MM Pro which obviously isn't the perfect combination. But the resulting field of view is close enough to what I had in mind. So I binned by two which gave me a matching pixel size for this scope and my seeing.

I tried several galxies before with my Newton scopes and they came out okayish. The new ES on the other hand is much slower which is a drawback. But it is also much lighter and the EQ6 mounts handled the payload very well. I didn't use the 0,7x reducer to get the reach needed. So the subs were taken at f7.5 and 925mm focal length.

I stacked the image after I took the subs and got a bit dissapointed about the quality of the master frames. They showed weird linear halos I could not explain. Honestly, I wasn't able to find a reason for this kind of problem. After serveral days, I asked you guys about it and two responds later the problem was solved. It was just a ticked box in WBPP which I should not have set. Yesterday I took the time to do the processing. I forced myself to watch some videos of Adam Blocks' fundamental video series and tried to get a deeper dive into image processing. I'm still far from the skills of some other guys here. Although Adams techniques worked for my image, I later decided to do my own methods to my image. The result is the best galaxy image I shot so far. At least in my opinion. I am not a fan of high contrasts and oversaturated colors in galaxy images. I get the point, but to me, less is more in this case.

This image is one of my favorites now. Also, I am really glad I bought the scope as well. I can't wait to see the narrowband results with the reducer later this year. Until then, I will have look at more of Adams crazy videos and hopefully will improve on the software side, too.