NGC 6946 got and deserves its’ name of the Fireworks Galaxy as it  has been the site of 10 observed supernova in the last 100 years, compared to 1 -2 per century in our own Milky Way Galaxy. It is a Starburst galaxy, with extremely high rate of star formation. And aside from the many supernova, it also has been found to have a number of X-ray sources as well.

The Fireworks is an intermediate spiral with a small central bar. At 25.2 million light years it is too far away to be part of our Local  Group of galaxies, rather it is one of the isolated galaxies in the Virgo Supercluster, which encompasses the Local Group as well as the Virgo Cluster.

As the Fireworks Galaxy is at the border of Cygnus and Cepheus, close to the galactic plane of the Milky Way, it Is heavily obscured by interstellar matter. There was a lot of intervening gas and dust visible in this raw data, so I decided to embrace it, rather than enhance the galaxy at the expense of the dust. Hope you like a different look than most of the images that I have seen of this obscured galaxy.

My Processing:
All raw files were calibrated, registered and stacked using DeepSkyStacker. The HaLRGB image was composed in Startools into the NB accent and LRGB channels, respectively, followed background extraction, digital development, HDR, deconvolution and color modules. In PhotoShop a starless version was made with StarXterminator, followed by the APF-R multi-scale unsharp mask (as used by NASA). Finally, NoiseXterminator was applied to both starless and star layers. Final color balance and levels adjustments finished off the processing.

RASC Robotic Telescope Data
Date: 2022 Sep-Oct
Exposures: Total  20 h;  Lum 11 h, RGB 7 h; Ha 2 h
Luminance: 65 x 600 s (1x1)
RGB: 15,14,12 x 600 s (1x1)
Ha: 4 x 1,800 s (1x1)
Flats, Darks and Biases (used as Flat Darks) 
Location: Sierra Remote Observatories, Auberry, California
Telescope: RCOS 16" f/8.9 (3550mm focal length)
CCD Camera: SBIG STX16803 16MP (4096 x 4096)
Mount: Paramount ME
Filters: SBIG LRGB, Ha (7nm)