For me the draw of NGC 3521 was the dusty bubble that surrounds this spiral galaxy. Reading about it however, these are described as "likely tidal debris, streams of stars torn from satellite galaxies that have
undergone mergers with NGC 3521 in the distant past."
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220505.html So maybe dust is not the right description. It's fascinating to think that what I was imagining as little dust particles may actually be stars! The off-center, blue arm on the right also suggest past interactions.
The core is extremely bright and sits behind a haze of tidal streams. The out parts of the bubble are quite faint and the more you stretch the more you see. So I assumed my process would be a initial stretching followed by HDRMT and then curves tweaks to maximize the detail of the bubble. After not liking those results I tried a new (to me) script by Sketchpad call iHDR. It works something like the Masked Stretch process but you have more control. But the best part was that the result produced an HDR image that still had contrast in both highlights and shadows.
The script link you add to repositories in PI is:
https://astrouri.com/pixinsight/scripts/iHDR/
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