M63 and M101

Just 5 days after taking the last comet image, I had a rare clear night that I spent imaging all night. Notice that I didn't say I stayed awake all night, just that I imaged all night. I've tried this once before, with some success, so I thought I would try it again. This time the targets were M63, aka the sunflower galaxy, and M101, aka the pinwheel galaxy. I took about 4 hours of data for each of them. What this translates into is that I imaged 1 hour through each of the 4 filters. I have found that I can image about 1 minute before bad things start to happen (like sky glow starting to take over the exposure or satellites moving through the image). So what I'm left to process is about 240 images per galaxy. What you see below, then, is about 480 minutes of exposure time and 480 images that I processed. On these 2 images, I used a new-to-me process of calibrating, aligning, and stacking in Nebulosity (which is normal), then combining the red, green, and blue channels to make a singe RGB image (new and new from here on). The Lum channel was processed in the same way and left as just the Lum channel. Then each channel was imported into GIMP 2.10.18 and stretched to get as good of an image as possible, showing as much detail as possible. Then the Lum image was copied as a new layer onto the RGB image. By changing to layer Mode to Luminance and varying the opacity, the images below were produced. This was by far much better than I got using Nebulosity alone. I hope you enjoy.

M63 at full resolution

M101 at full resolution