This low luminosity galaxy normally yields washed out colours. So the idea was to brighten its colours without adding too many artifacts. Sky cleared on few moonless nights, a very rare occurrence, cloud cover is now almost ubiquitous throughout the year. Wintery rains and very high humidity, viewing conditions were less than ideal but had to make the most of it.
My first attempt with RC Astro's software. What I liked the most is having to get past PI decon workflow. Seriously that is one thing that keeps me from processing images (besides 335 days of cloud cover). BlurXTerminator made it so easy. It did introduce some artifacts around few extra fat stars, or to be fair it simply magnified the imaging system aberrations caused by poor viewing and poor focus (just no time for it). PI's
HDRMultiscaleTransform and LocalHistogramEqualization on final LRGBHA redistributed image brightness into better colour distributions for outer blue, middle reddish-brown star forming region, and pale yellowish core vastly improving mid-section structural details.
There is no alternative to great viewing conditions, precision mount, big sharp newtonian. Having said this C8 can still go a long way with bit of help from software
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