I captured the data for this in early 2021 but could not decide between focusing on the faintest tidal stream data or the galaxy proper. I've always been drawn to the detail of this beautiful spiral, the dark lanes and the little extension connecting to a tuft of star forming area lower right. So I decided on optimzing the galaxy proper and maybe I'll leave the tidal streams for later with more data or a darker site.
One the lower right of the galaxy I see a straight line that I initially thought was a jet of some sort. Looking close this is clearly behind the galaxy, as we see the dust crossing in front. I'm now thinking it is a background needle galaxy. Referring to
@John Hayes version
https://www.astrobin.com/full/dhogsm/D/ this seems more clear. Do you know what it is?
Cropping was also a question here as the dust envelope is pretty big and you need a wider view to see the sky background without the dust for contrast.
I'm experimenting with incremental stretches that both keep the stars from saturating and don't over stretch the background sky. This was done with two very light applications of ArcSinh followed by a Histrogram stretch. The ArcSihn stretches were at a strength of only 5.0 each with background at 0.
I also applied HDRMT to a starless version of the Luminance. I found using starless easier than masking the stars. I often find that the HDRMT process goes a bit farther than I would like so I used two differnet algorithms and blended the result of those two with the original data at 40/30/30 to better balance the result.
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