This is first light for my C11 EdgeHD and SBIG 16803 combination, since I mounted them side by side with the C14 on the PME II. It is also my first deep sky image since June last year. You may recall that previously I was swapping between planetary/ lunar and deep sky on the C14.
Perhaps stupidly, I decided that this first image should be a 2 panel mosaic. Given that I normally gather 20-25 hours per panel, this ended up requiring 42.5 hours of data. With delays in the upgrade project, the wettest year on record and generally poor seeing, it has taken me a long time to get to this point. In fact I probably threw out half the data due to poor FWHM values.
So why 2 panels? Well, not only is NGC 1365 my favourite galaxy, it is situated in the most amazing and beautiful field of more distant galaxies, many outside what I have captured here. These are part of the Fornax cluster of galaxies. I love to see these magnificent galaxies set in a wider FOV and the C11 gives me a decided advantage over the C14 in that regard. Nevertheless I still needed 2 panels to get the other galaxies I was interested in.
Once I had the data, I began a long journey on the processing side. So much has changed since my last image, with new and improved processes available in PixInsight, that I had to invest a lot of time in coming up the learning curves.
Since this was a mosaic I had to start by learning the Mosaic by Coordinates script and the associated Trim Mosaic Tile and Photometric  Mosaic scripts. I have to say these are a vast improvement over the previous processes and worked really well. Next was the new Spectrophotometric Colour Calibration (SPCC) process. Again this worked excellently and I am sure gave me the most accurate colour calibration I've ever had, particularly as it takes into account the camera and filter characteristics of one's set up. I also used 3 RC Astro processes for the first time. BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator, & StarXTerminator. These I found to be very easy to use and gave excellent results. They represent quite a watershed in image processing. I decided to apply BlurXTerminator only to the Super Luminance image since it is a Deconvolution process and the experience of others suggests it may affect the accuracy of  the SPCC Colour Calibration. In any case I was able to achieve excellent deconvolution of the Luminance image which of course came through into the final image as part of the LRGB Combination. Next I spent quite some time on the Generalised Hyperbolic Stretch process and I also found it to give excellent results. Finally, I added the Ha component in a more rigorous fashion than I had done previously, with the Continuum Mapping process as developed by Vincent Peris, but more particularly I found the tutorial by Eduardo Radice to be very useful. I captured a lot of Ha data (11 hours) and it came through nicely in the final image.
I used StarXTerminator to remove the stars before employing a number of processes to enhance the galaxies, before then adding the stars back into the image with Pixel Math.
So to the content of the image. NGC 1365, at a Declination of -36 degrees, is ideally situated for my 33 degree South latitude. The detail of this wonderful galaxy can be seen in a cropped in image, Version F, and accessed via the mouseover. It is in the constellation of Fornax. It is clearly a barred spiral of beautiful structure and form. At 200,000 light years in diameter it is nearly twice the size of the Milky Way and is about 56 million light years distant. I love the structure of the dust lanes at its core.
The large elliptical galaxy at upper left is NGC 1389. It and the one below it NGC 1386 are in the constellation of Eridanus. The latter is about 53 million ly away and given that it is at approximately the same distance as NGC 1365, it is clearly smaller having a diameter of ~ 50,000 ly. It is a type 2 Seyfert galaxy and has both spiral and elliptical features. The spiral structure is very well seen in the image. I also love the tiny face-on spiral PGC 13330 at lower left in the image.
Check out the number of galaxies that can be seen in this image. If that doesn't blow your mind, nothing will.