This is the Draco Trio of galaxies, sometimes call the "Galaxy Sampler", since it shows an elliptical, a face-on spiral and an edge-on spiral galaxy.

The edge-on spiral is NGC 5981
The face-on spiral is NGC 5985
The elliptical is NGC 5982

The original data for this image was not very good, as everything was very soft.  I don't know the cause of the softness.  It could have been seeing.  It could have been focus.  Or it could be that I am used to seeing more recent data from my much better rig.  In any case, I've taken a few tries at processing this one, but have never been happy with the results to finish.  So now that I've got my new processing machine set up and have all the XTerminator plug-ins.  In particular, I wanted to see if BlurXTerminator could mitigate the soft focus...and it did.

The capture details on this on are all over the place.  The idea is that I would spend a few days at a friend's property in Prineville, OR, and we'd each do some imaging.  I managed to get two nights of data in Prineville, but somehow managed to miss out collecting enough red data.  So I did one more night from my home (at the time) in Snohomish, WA to get the rest of the red.  Since I only did red on that last night, I actually have significantly  more red data than the other channels.  Since I had  (lots) more light pollution in Snohomish than Prineville, I figured that too much red data was better than not enough.

I'm still not completely happy with it, as it doesn't look very natural to my eye.  Part of the issue is mottled noise in the background, which I handled by making the background very dark.  I was hoping that NoiseXTerminator would take care of it, but it didn't.  I suspect that the scale of the noise is just too large for NXT to notice.  I suppose that I could clean it up with some clever use of MMT, but I've already put so much time in on it that I am ready for a break.  Maybe I'll revisit the data again someday, although it's likely that I'll just recapture it with newer gear.

Speaking of gear, I was surprised how different the gear was here, from what I am using today.  Here are the details:

Scope: Meade 8" ACF
Camera: SBIG ST10-XME
Mount: Astro-Physics AP1600 (before I added the encoders)
Guide Camera: Starlight Xpress Ultrastar
Camera Rotator: Optec Pyxis LE

The capture software was as follows:

Capture: MaxIm/DL 6.1
Focus: FocusMax
Guider: CCDAutoPilot
Automation: CCDAutoPilot

Processed in PixInsight, with the latest version of RC-Astro's BlurXTerminator, NoiseXTerminator and StarXTerminator