Cigar Galaxy

[oska]

NGC 4945 Apparently called The Tweezers Galaxy too, by blind people.

I tried running the 2600mc on the LX200 8" for shi'ggles. I tried out a crayford sct focuser for the first time. The scope seems to hold focus better now the main mirror is locked.
There was much "learning", lucky the dog is deaf. The focus and guiding were much more fun than usual. I ended up having to binx2 to get auto focus to work reliably. Binning didn't help guiding and it was a loss for the first two nights. Then the seeing improved over the next days and away we stumbled. Many subs were culled fighting clouds and QLD humidity.
I tried drizzle and it helped combat the scope/cam miss-match (and poor seeing?) but I couldn't process out a reflection artefact from a nearby bright star in that version.
BX wouldn't play nice with it at all.
What did work(ish) was resizing by half straight up. Then dbe, spcc and then starX, then BX on the starless only, soft stretch, curves. BB's Star reduction #3 on softest to slightly tighten the soft stars
Loving only using bias and flats on the 2600, sweet! No darks!

80% of 122 x 300s, 100g, 50o, -10C
LX200 8" F/10
ASI2600MC
EQ6R

NINA + DSS + PI

Tips, tricks, criticisms and witty retorts most welcome.

[AstroViking]

That's a good image, John, especially well deserved after such a battle with pretty much everything.

Oh, the dog isn't deaf. It just doesn't understand complicated words beyond "sit", "down", "walkies" and "dinner!". :P

Cheers,
V

[Dave882]

Nice job mate - after all you’re efforts it’s a very tidy image and starting to get a bit of colour coming through in the body of the galaxy too well done!

A quick note- those reflections around a bright star could actually be NGC4945A - a spiral galaxy that looks quite diffuse hanging around that star. I remember when I first imaged this galaxy I spent lots of time trying to fix my ‘problem’ till I realised it was supposed to be there lol

[oska]

Cheers V, I was actually going to give up on this for a better night, twice, but I forgot to change the rig around so I did the lazy thing and went with it, yeah twice.

Cheers Dave, I'm going with your explanation ;) Here's the drizzled one. The stars get a bit out of hand though.

[Bodon]

Great image John! Really nice. Im on the sth coast and it always raining or overcast...Does it rain where you are.....
Question on your drizzle; do you let weightedbatchprocessing do the drizzle or just process and use drizzleintergaration?
Ta

[oska]

Cheers Steve, generally it rains here all summer then very little. We get from dew to fog almost every night. A dew free night is a rarity.
Usually WBPP, it just makes it easy. This time though I used DSS because I was impatient.

[JQ1977]

Great image Steve! Details on the nebula are very clear.

[oska]

Cheers mate.