M94 galaxy 22nd-24th March 2022

[Tommohawk]

Hi all!

I got 3 nights on this although the moon was up a lot of the time - average 70% illuminated. It is certainly a beast to process and I had a lot of fun keeping the colours sensible - I used some masking for star colours and slight enhancement of the halo, but I don't like overdoing this. Otherwise it was just curves plus selective curves for colour and some noise reduction on the halo.

I've seen lots of renditions of M94 and no 2 are the same it seems - so whether mine is accurate of not, I have no idea! Open to thoughts and criticisms as ever.

Apart from being a bit of a blighter to process, the structure of M94 is rather odd - the outer ring is unusual and its origins seem unclear. Looking at it visually, it's tempting to infer that the halo represents the dark matter known to lurk around all galaxies. Except that M94 apparently has little or no dark matter which makes it a bit a galactic freak. Way above my pay grade, but lots of info on Wiki etc for anyone who's interested.

Lashed out on Astropixel processor for another year. Fabulous kit, but painfully slow when using lots of subs a la CMOS - I had to process the RGB separately from the LUM and then register the two sets. No biggie, but detracts from the one of the key attractions for me with APP - ie bung it all in and let APP sort it out. Speaking with APP's (excellent) support people, it seems speed is a known issue and its being worked on. BTW to speed things up I created Masterdarks and bad pixel map first.

On the plus side, I did a few slices of toast on the CPU.

The trusty 200PDS and HEQ5 combo, ASI1600 cool @ -20degC, 60 second subs for all, no binning as target fairly small. R=157mins, G=161 mins, B=171 mins, LUM=482 mins. Captured with NINA. I let APP do its quality selection thing, so difficult to know what was actually used from these subs. Bit of PS. Well quite a lot of PS actually. Also some star reduction with APP - which now also features star removal option (which I didn't really evaluate)

Thanks for looking! 

 

[russ]

That's really nice. Some nice detail in there.

[tomato]

Nice image, it does look like it might be a tough one to process.

[Tommohawk]

On 18/04/2022 at 13:11, russ said:

That's really nice. Some nice detail in there.

 

17 hours ago, tomato said:

Nice image, it does look like it might be a tough one to process.

Thanks both and thanks for all the likes too. Doesn't come across in my initial comments, but I was pleasantly surprised at the final outcome!