PinWheel Galaxy (M101 - UMa) - Reaching for the galaxies with the C8 EHD (Wouter Cazaux)

PinWheel Galaxy (M101 - UMa) - Reaching for the galaxies with the C8 EHD

Revision title: StarLess-Stars blend adjusted

PinWheel Galaxy (M101 - UMa) - Reaching for the galaxies with the C8 EHD

I had two reasons for getting the C8 EHD:
1/ get closer to the moon and planets
2/ get deeper into space, beyond our Milky Way and reach for the galaxies

The previous couple of posts have addressed the moon and planets.
This post is the first step on that second journey ...

Straight capturing with UVIR (8h20), and some with the L-Pro (3h30, don’t ask me why, it may have helped to pull out some of the Ha), some 'real' Ha may come later. Even with nearly 12hrs, it seems still a bit short on integration time at f10 (native focal length, no reducer, no binning, no crop).

Processing with BlurXTerminator and StarXterminator. Some changes to my processing work-flow, I still need to assess whether they are good or wrong. Gave the colours a boost on the rgb, processed detail on the luminance, processed the stars separately. A bit of an issue in re-combining the stars, which I do with a simple pixelMath, as that seems to blow up those stars were there’s already a background, like on the galaxy itself. Not sure how I need to adapt my formula for that ... [UPDATE: See revision]

It’s always a bit of learning … Happy to hear your thoughts ….

M101
C8, UVIR/L-PRO, ASI2600MC, EQ6-R Pro
180s 237x = 11h51
20230214-20230302

Any constructive guidance is welcome .. always looking how I can still improve on this

Original
Final
B

B

Title: StarLess-Stars blend adjusted

Description: Thanks to a kind suggestion on the previous version, referring me to Russel Roman's explanation on the PixInsight forum on how to blend starless and star-images, I now know how to put all that star-stuff into the blender, ie. pixelMath. The only thing that changed on this version is the final blend of starless+stars. No more overblown stars in the galaxy! And a very tiny adjustment on the black point of the background ...
As a bonus, the image is now successfully plate-solved ...

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7320887
PixInsight job	H08H4D0T7UHADRHGO5RSN1GUU8274S61
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	14h03m20s.387
RA (top/left)	14h05m23s.740
RA (top/right)	14h01m15s.133
RA (bottom/right)	14h01m18s.251
RA (bottom/left)	14h05m24s.346

Dec (center)	+54°21′15″.40
Dec (top/left)	+54°33′36″.78
Dec (top/right)	+54°33′12″.32
Dec (bottom/right)	+54°08′46″.19
Dec (bottom/left)	+54°09′09″.33

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