NGC 2403, a wonderful intermediate spiral galaxy. I have seen this a few times and always on first glance mistaken it for M33, they are exceptionally similar. It is situated in the constellation of Camelopardalis, a perfect area of the sky as it minimises sky pollution for my location so this was a natural target for me. I was keen on getting a target that displayed strong areas of starburst activity to see if it was possible to discern some of the structures with a 6" scope, I think I have managed to achieve some level of detail but when I compare to similar size scopes however, it is obvious I still have some collimation issues.

The approach for this target was to ensure that HII regions were clearly prominent and as such attempted for the first time Ha continuum extraction using Pixel Math in Siril. Instead of adding the Ha as a layer on top of the other four channels, I blended the continuum extracted Ha into the Red channel for a more interesting softer look, I quite like it. I am still trying to figure out how to combine all these different channels well and have had some difficulties with Lum, it being very bright in the past. In this instance I reduced the gain to 0 for the Lum channel  and integrated all and controlled the Lum in APP rather than add it as a layer in PP software, this seemed to produce much better results and colours and gave much better control. I have found recently that when removing stars and then adding them back, for some reason I am losing a lot of detail so opted to use masks and not stretch the galaxy and stars independently, so there has been a trade off between detail and size of stars for this image.

Its been another interesting project and I quite like the result. My learning here is that its great to do research on your target but don't try to emulate the results of others, especially when they have larger scopes, darker skies etc. Work with what you have.

CS Brad