Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Ursa Major (UMa)  ·  Contains:  Cigar Galaxy  ·  M 82  ·  NGC 3034
M82 "Cigar Galaxy" in HaLRGB, Aaron Freimark
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M82 "Cigar Galaxy" in HaLRGB

M82 "Cigar Galaxy" in HaLRGB, Aaron Freimark
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M82 "Cigar Galaxy" in HaLRGB

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Preprocessing
1. Subframe Sector to weed out any subs with Eccentricity ≥ 0.7
2. Weighted Batch Processing
3. Drizzle Integration with a Region of Interest to crop to the cluster
4. Dynamic Background Extraction

Ha
1. EZ Denoise
2. StarXterminator
3. Arcsinh Stretch
4. Histogram Transformation
5. Convert to RGB
6. CurvesTransformation to make a nice shade of red
7. Histogram Transformation

L
1. EZ Denoise
2. Histogram Transformation

Mask
1. Start with L
2. Run StarXterminator
3. Histogram Transformation to brighten galactic center

RGB
1. ChannelCombination to combine R, G, and B
2. Color Calibration
4. EZ Soft Stretch
5. Extract CIE*L, darken background a bit, then re-apply using LRGB Combination with Saturation = 0.3; repeat
6. Convolution
7. LRGBCombination to apply L
8. StarXterminator to remove stars to a separate image
9. On stars, apply Morphological Transformation to erode star sizes
10. On starless RGB galaxy, apply the mask to protect the blue-hued galactic center, then apply PixelMath: 1-((1-RGB)*(1-Ha))
11. Curves Transformation to get the starburst just right
12. Bring stars back with PixelMath: $T + 0.8*stars

Comments

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

M82 "Cigar Galaxy" in HaLRGB, Aaron Freimark