Bode's Galaxy (M81) - Blink: RGB + HaRGB

Was hoping to capture a personal “definitive” M81 this season, but I discovered late in the process that my EdgeHD 8’s secondary was loose, and weather did not cooperate to recover. So this is what I have for 2023. Star bloat and aberrations were the main issues. I kept a stray red blotch in the Ha just lower left of Holmberg IX but I think it's an artifact. 

Capture:
2.5hr R, 2.9hr B, 1hr G, Astronomik Deepsky RGB and 12hr Ha,Astronomik 6nm. No L, as is my habit lately. No time to do L anyway and this target is not dim.  

The weird RGB ratios are just what I had time to capture. Normally I’d do 1:1:1 and was aiming for 3hrs each. The Ha was captured while the moon was up earlier in the month.

120 sec for RGB, 240 sec for Ha, both unity gain and 0C, my normal settings now I have a stable mount (if not secondary, LOL). 

ZWO ASI294MM on 0.7x reduced and wobbly secondary EdgeHD 8 on iOptron GEM45. 

Processing:
WBPP in PixInsight with AutoCrop, Linear Fit to green, ChannelCombination, ABE (Box 10, Func 2, Sub), SPCC, BlurXTerminator (gentle to avoid "worms" - 0.25/0.50 nonstellar), NoiseXTerminator (fairly strong 0.8), EZ Soft Stretch (lazy but so helpful), StarXTerminator (split nebula from stars). 

Nebula: Iterative Curves to fix saturation and contrast between background and foreground, masked using extracted L (not normally what I do but trying it out). 

Stars: Curves to fix saturation and contrast, SCNR -green, screen combine with the Nebula. 

Recombined:
RGB - Background Neutralization on preview, TIF export, Adobe Lightroom for some extra selective saturation, Texture, and final a little sharpen. Also fixed a couple of cosmetic corrections manually due to (probably) bad flats (maybe the moving secondary) and the worst of the chromatic aberration (probably) from the infamous 0.7x reducer. Microcontrast with some gentle EZ HDR and Local Histogram Equalization. Final gentle star reduction with another stellar-only BXT. Cosmetic tweaks in Lightroom.

HaRGB - simply used NBRGBCombination script (normally use raw PM using the LightVortex tutorial, but this is simple and worked after some experimentation) on the linear RGB ChannelCombination and the Ha autocrop after a gentle BlurXTerminator on Ha alone. Then proceeded as for RGB. (Via some abandoned dead-ends, first with just using the RGB stars only and then with star reduction -- both failed for different reasons.)

Previous best images from 2 yrs ago:
https://astrob.in/5v8b57/B/ (LRGB on AT8RC)
https://astrob.in/mz8xz0/0/ (HaLRGB on AT8RC)