Second attempt at M101 widefield.

[Felias]

I have just finished processing my images from two nights ago (taken from the fields near Petham, roughly Bortle 4). I managed about an hour and a half of data on M101, which was conveniently high in the sky. Of course, there wasn't proper astro darkness, and by the time I was taking darks and flats, it was almost morning. But it's only my second attempt at M101, and I'm happy with the improvement (the bar was quite low, though, having only taken 30 min of data my first time). I decided not to crop the star field (just the stacking artifacts) and show the galaxy in context. There are quite a few other galaxies, identified in astrometry.net (although it left out UGC 8837 and UGC 9071, which are easily seen above 86UMa and on the centre-left of the picture, respectively). I've seen very saturated photos of M101 around, but I thought I'd not push the colours much., to make it look more natural. The HII regions still pop out, quite bluish in my unmodded DSRL. They gave me some trouble and I had to start from scratch after my first processing when I realised that Starnet had identified many of them as stars, and removed them from the picture. I finally decided to reduce the stars in the old-fashioned way of creating a mask using the selective colour tool in PS. I wonder if anyone else has encountered this problem in widefield pictures?

Comments/suggestions welcome, as always.

100x1 min subs. WO Z61, Canon 77D on a Star Adventurer. Stacked and colour-calibrated in Siril, processed in Photoshop.