A mighty fine effort there Jase!
The galaxy itself has a nice full body feel to it and yep there is no substitute for focal length when it comes to imaging galaxies.
I assume that was Brad's scope again?
There is always that tossup between revealing the core structure and producing a "flatter" looking disk and keeping the core more bulbous and burned out. Both approaches have their proponents and each to their own as long as the core revealing doesn't look too unnatural or the burnout too strong and saturated.
I am sure you must be annoyed by the gradients and colour spekles remaining but the galaxy itself is really quite good. With such a small field and having imaged with no moon what do you think caused the gradients? Are the spekles from dithering problems again? I remember you had the same problem with the Helix shot done on Brad's beast. Are you noticing that after dark subtraction there are still hot pixels remaining that don't correspond between subs so when conbined you end up with coloured pixels all over the image?
My ProLine had this issue initially and thus dithering the subs and median combining them was the only way around it. A reload of new firmware in the camera, courtesy of FLI, has fixed the problem though and now I don't need to dither guide anymore and simply summing or "adding" the undithered subs shows very few residual rougue unmatched pixels remaining, After dark subtraction, it's now almost as good as my SXV-H9 with its silky smooth Sony chip
. Aparently my KAI11K chip had been incorrectly "clocked" and dark current was leaking out over time producing variations in hot pixel maps from sub to sub? All cured now though.
Very nice work again
Mike