M81 M82 etc

[Mike in Rancho]

Likely to be my final iteration of this data. The full FOV, binned to 35, in order to round off the triangle stars best I could. But I backed way off on the HDR and the bright saturation, more like the crop rendition.

I still liked the way the less binned data reacted to enhancement and especially NB Accent. But I could stomach the triangles.

The M82 turned out fair. Better than I've ever done in the past, of course, but still just fair. I struggled to get Screen 1 of NB Accent to a place that seemed to work out. And it's still kind of mucky in there. Much of it I think is legit Ha detail, but some scattered spots further out I'm not so sure about.

I almost wonder if a different Wipe would have helped better. I used the Uncal1 with modifications which has helped with my (usually L filter) issues before, and indeed it did again, except it seemed to impart almost a reverse gradient to the Ha file, which left me then fighting that on Screen 1.

Overall probably not bad for 5 hours of my skies though. A lot of good stuff in the background, though little if any IFN as I compressed the shadows a lot due to the quality there.

Will edit in a a-bin link to the (somewhat) bigger file once that's all uploaded.

M81 LRGBHa 5h ST9 4B 1600-500.jpg (515.52 KiB) Viewed 1417 times

https://astrob.in/6g1qd3/0/