Deer Lick Group + Stephan's Quintet

[dx_ron]

This pushes the limits of my focal length and sky conditions probably close to as much as I should push them. About 6.6 hours (266x90s) with AT130EDT at 910mm under skies that measure ~18.85 mag/arcsec^2 on a SQM-L meter. Getting too late in the season to push for more time this year.

I tried a couple of approaches and settled on keeping it unbinned until after the Color module, then binned to 50%.

I don't normally crop my images for composition, but I guess small galaxies are an exception. This is the cropped version (it is sad to crop out the lovely spiral NGC 7343 from the bottom of the full image, but something had to be left on the cutting room floor.

As always, my current color rendition probably warrants comments and suggestions (which are welcome overall in general, of course)

Deer_Lick_266x90s_rgb-aligned_bin50_after_color_cropped_1600.jpg (468.7 KiB) Viewed 37487 times

[Mike in Rancho]

That's cool just to be able to get these famous groupings, usually imaged by CDK's and whatnot, I imagine.

Curious what percentage of crop happened, even at 910mm. I suppose I can look things up on Stellarium to see how my 585mm fits it (Ha!), but I'm lazy.

Not sure I'd change much other than compressing the background, but I'm a dark outer space type. Color balance maybe is leaning towards green or yellow (if capped)? But maybe that's what these galaxies look like.

[dx_ron]

Here's the uncropped frame. The big downside of the cropped version for me is the loss of the really cute little spiral galaxy at the bottom (I'm sure the millions of sentient species living there won't mind me calling it that)

I also opened the .tiff in Siril and moved the bp over. I think it helps with the mottled background left behind by SuperStructure without too much loss of real detail - though I suspect someone on CN will complain about clipped blacks.

Deer_Lick_266x90s_rgb-aligned_bin50_after_color_bp-adjust.jpg (671.2 KiB) Viewed 37199 times