I last shot this thing back in 2022, decided to give it another go from darker skies. Captured on April 19th, 2026 from a Bortle 3 zone (Deerlick Astronomy Village).

Places where I host my other images:

Flickr | Pixelfed

Equipment:

• TPO 6" F/4 Imaging Newtonian

• Orion Sirius EQ-G

• ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro

• Skywatcher Quattro Coma Corrector

• ZWO EFW 8x1.25"/31mm

• Astronomik LRGB+CLS Filters- 31mm

• Astrodon 31mm Ha 5nm, Oiii 3nm, Sii 5nm

• Agena 50mm Deluxe Straight-Through Guide Scope

• ZWO ASI-290mc for guiding

• Moonlite Autofocuser

Acquisition: 8 hours 30 minutes (Camera at unity gain, -15°C)

• L - 68x180"

• R - 34x180"

• G - 34x180"

• B - 34x180"

• Darks- 30

• Flats- 30 per filter

Capture Software:

• Captured using N.I.N.A. and PHD2 for guiding and dithering.

PixInsight Preprocessing:

• BatchPreProcessing

• StarAlignment

• Blink

• ImageIntegration per channel

• DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5)

• Dynamic Crop

• Multiscale Gradient Correction with MARS Project data

Luminance linear:

• BlurXterminator

• StarXterminator to completely remove stars (extracted stars processed separately)

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

RGB Linear:

• Channelcombination to make color image from RGB stacks

• SpectrophotometricColorCalibration

• BlurXTerminator

• StarX to remove stars (to be used for star addition later)

• HSV Repair

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear

• Slight curves saturation boost and histogram adjustments

Stars only image:

• BlurXterminator for discortion correction and some mild star reduction

• ArcsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear (less aggressive stretch)

• Slight curve adjustments

Nonlinear Processing

• LRGBCombination to combine stretched RGB and L images

• DeepSNR Noise reduction

• Shitloads of curve transformations to adjust luminance, contrast, saturation, etc

• More curves

• NoiseXterminator for small scale chrominance noise reduction

• LocalHistogramEqualization

• Pixelmath to add in the stretched stars only image from earlier

  This basically re-linearizes the two images, adds them together, and then stretches them back to before. More info on it here

  mtf(.005,

  mtf(.995,Stars)+

  mtf(.995,Starless))

• NoiseXTerminator for some small scale chrominance noise reduction

• Resample to 80%

• DynamicCrop in on just the galaxy

• Annotation

Hot balls of fudge the universe is a big place.