StarTools

The "Little Pinwheel" is a lovely face-on, unbarred spiral near mu Ursa Major. Stellarium calls it NGC 3180, but if you search in Stallarium for NGC 3184 it takes you to the same place. Wikipedia says that NGC 3180 refers to an Ha region within NGC 3184.

This is the sort of target where the maxim "no point in focal length much beyond 1000mm because seeing won't support it" crashes into the other maxim "you need all the focal length you can get".

AT130EDT (910mm focal length) + IMX571c. 5 hours (151 x 120s) from SQM 18.7 skies (not quite B7, but close to that). Dithered every sub then CFA drizzled in Siril. Only the jpg for now, because it needs more time. I binned 50% to gain some semblance of a clean image, then cropped to avoid having to shrink any further for presentation.

Another try at "parallel processing". Once with 12-bit optidev and stretched for the galaxy, then 16-bit optidev and stretched to be as gentle on the stars as I could, then Layer to merge them. OK, I think? I added some equalized grain and some skyglow to the star image to try to match the background better.

There's a surprising dearth of distant background galaxies in the field.

Telescopius says NGC3180 is part of a galaxy. But it says the exact same thing about NGC 3184 On wikidata I found a picture pointing to NGC 3180 as certain region of the galaxy (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1103384# ... 0_SDSS.jpg).

Anyway, great image, especially considering the light pollution you have to fight. At least you had quite some focal length at hand. Stars look great. And the galaxy also has quite some details and the overall structure is very prominent. I maybe would have pushed the color more towards blue, to me it looks as if there would be very slight green tint. But apart from that I like the natural look of the galaxy a lot.

Your layering approach looks pretty promising. I think you did very well.

Did you apply HDR and Sharp? Maybe there is still potential for revealing more of the core (especially with HDR) if you haven't done already.

Regards
Stefan