M81 - Bode's Galaxy & M82 - Cigar Galaxy
Back in early march I set up M81 & M82 as a late night target after some of my Orion targets set around midnight and then promptly forgot that I had configured that sequence. This is the results of that lapse in memory.
Total integration time ended up at ~15 hours split over L-R-G-B. I was very happy with the amount of dust that I was able to pull out of the background given all of this was taken in my B6/B7 backyard shooting into the light dome.
451x60s L = 7.5 hours
149x60s R = 2.5 hours
149x60s G = 2.5 hours
148x60s B = 2.5 hours
Total = 14.95 hours
Image acquisition done in N.I.N.A.
Preprocessing done in PixInsight using WBPP for each night separately
Final stacks made with DrizzleIntegration using the VarK=1.5 Kernel, scale 2x
Post-Processing
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Luminance
* SuperLum created by integrating R, G, B, & L with no rejection, noise evaluation for weighing
* DynamicCrop
* DynamicBackgroundExtraction - 3 rounds with focus on large scale gradients first, then finer gradients after
* Deconvolution using EZDeconvolution
* IntegerResample to downscale back to original resolution
* TGVDenoise & MultiscaleMedianTransform using EZDenoise
* HistogramTransformation to bring in black point
* HistogramTransformation for stretch
* HDRMultiscaleTransformation to HDR the galaxy cores
Color
* DynamicBackgroundExtraction on R, G, & B channels
* ChannelCombination
* BackgroundNeutralization
* PhotometricColorCalibration
* SCNR to bring down green
* ChannelCombination to integrate L
* Curves for saturation
* LRGBCombination with Chrominance Denoise enabled for color NR
* Curves for days
* More curves
* Some more curves
* MorphologicalTransformation for star reduction
* Some light LHE on background to bring out dust contrast a bit
* HistogramTransformation to bring in black point a bit
* Crop & Rotate 90 degrees
* MultiscaleMedianTransform for some additional background noise reduction
* UnsharpMask to bring out a bit more sharpness in the galaxies
* Curves for color, contrast, & saturation
* ColorSaturation to bring out the blues a bit
* ACDNR to reduce chrominance noise that was brought out by all the curves
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