u/Anhur55

Sorry if this is considered spam - but reedited the photo from the other day and it came out so much better I had to share!

All the same equipment/etc as last time, just found a great tutorial by seti-astro on editing in PI - Here

M51 taken over the past half month from my backyard! Bortle 4.5 - 5.0

Celestron 8SE w/ .68 Reducer on an EQ6R-Pro - ZWO ASI2600MM - ZWO LRGB Filters

Lum - 180s x 15 Hr.

R - 180s x 5 Hr.

G - 180s x 5 Hr.

B - 180s x 5 Hr.

20 Darks @ 180s

10 Flats/filter

Stacked, edited, and cropped in PI - Gradient Correction, Star Align, RGB Combine, Dynamic Crop, BlurX, NoiseX, StarX, curves stretch, Background Neutralization, Stat stretch - LRGB combine - curves stretch touch ups - star stretch - recombine RGB Stars

M51 taken over the past half month from my backyard! Bortle 4.5 - 5.0

Celestron 8SE w/ .68 Reducer on an EQ6R-Pro - ZWO ASI2600MM - ZWO LRGB Filters

Lum - 180s x 15 Hr.

R - 180s x 5 Hr.

G - 180s x 5 Hr.

B - 180s x 5 Hr.

20 Darks @ 180s

10 Flats/filter

Stacked, edited, and cropped in PI - Gradient Correction, Star Align, RGB Combine, Dynamic Crop, StarX, LRGB combine, curves stretch, Background Neutralization, recombine RGB Stars, BlurX, NoiseX

• Carbonstar 200

• ZWO ASI 2600

• ZWO LRGB Filters

• 15 Hours Lum x 180 secs

• 5 Hours R x 120 secs

• 5 Hours B x 120 secs

• 2.3 Hours G x 120 secs

• Star aligned my channels to Lum

• RGB Stacked Filters

• Cropped

• GraXpert BGE

• LRGB Combination

• Blur/NoiseX

I was having trouble deciding on a target my first galaxy shot of the year. The 800mm FL of the carbonstar proves a bit too wide for a lot of galaxy targets in a lot of detail - especially interacting galaxies which I find particularly interesting. I think for my next shot I'll take it on the 8SE with the reducer for a closer frame of the target.

Regardless, I'm quite happy with this one. The camera ended up disconnecting about two and a half hours into my green night, and frankly I don't think its worth it to come back and finish the subframes.

Finally, I'm trying to ID the reason for the gradient on the outside of the frame here as its the only glaring error I'm seeing and want to resolve. Any advice would be appreciated on that! I didn't use any calibration frames on this so I'm perfectly open to that being the issue, just want to make sure there's nothing in my editing i can change to help