M63 ASI224

[cuivenion]

Imaged over two nights this week, this is the Sunflower Galaxy M63 , in Canes Venatici . Total integration time is 6 1/2 hours with 30 second subs. I used 100 x Flats, 100 x Flat Darks, and 60 x Darks per night.

Imaging Equipment: Skywatcher 130PDS, Skywatcher HEQ5, ZWO ASI224 (Imaging camera), Altair GPCAM AR030C with Finderguider.

Software Used: EQMOD and CDC, PHD2 for guiding, Sharpcap 3.2 for capture, DeepSkyStacker 4.2 for stacking and calibrating, Pixinsight for processing.

Comments and criticisms welcome as ever.

[mikemabel]

What can you say but wow !

I can only admire your dedication . I tried to do as much imaging as i could due to the good weather

so no sleep . Good job i'm retired

Think this will be my next target

[cuivenion]

Cheers Mike.

[cuivenion]

That'll teach me to not check my subs, even if there are over 700 of them. Turns out one sub was completely purple and a number of others were elongated, I think because I had too short a dither recovery time. Here's a reprocess. The colour is a lot better after removing the purple sub.

[wimvb]

You have more colour variation in the galaxy, but also an odd colour in the core. If you use arcsinh stretch or masked stretch in pixinsight, you may need to use the colour repair script first. Hdr transform can also affect colour sometimes.

[cuivenion]

Cheers wim, I'll give it a go.