M101 - 4 hours

[R1k]

First light with new scope - I'm not particularly pleased with this and think it would greatly benefit from more integration time

 

Equipment:

Skywatcher HEQ5-pro (Rowan Belt Mod)

Canon 800d (modded)

Explore Scientific ED APO 102mm F7 FCD-100 Triplet Carbon Fibre

Altair Lightwave 0.8x field flattener/focal reducer

ZWO ASI-120MM-mini guide camera

Skywatcher Evoguide 50ED guidescope

2 inch mounted Optolong L-Pro

 

Acquisition:

Sharpcap polar alignment, ASCOM guiding/dithering with PHD2

APT image acquisition

Lights - 26 x 240s, ISO800 and 23 x 360s, ISO800

Darks - 15 + 15

Bias - 40 + 40

Flats - 40 + 40

 

Processing:

Raw images stacked, calibrated and autostretched in APP using all default settings (adaptive airy disc)

in photoshop, denoise of red channel and blue channel

set black and white points

selective curve stretch on galaxy

star colour boost using star mask and saturation sliders, star reduction using mask and filter - minimum

several iterations of selective contrast and saturation in enhancement to galaxy using layer mask

Denoise again including lum and colour using camera raw filter

Significant Crop to area of interest