M51 reprocessed and NGC4088 + SN2009a

I had a restack of my M51 data yesterday, at the suggestion from a couple of people on SGL, without the darks I'd taken. The results I found astonishing. The image was easier to process, less noisy and had more faint detail revealed. The connection between the two galaxies is now clear and the tail can also be seen (ok they're dim and probably more data will help with that, also if you look closely, there are a couple of dim fuzzies above and to the right that couldn't be seen in my original stack.



And I found I could crop in on this without too much bother, as the noise was less



I wonder what the criteria is for requiring darks... I know I don't get any issues with ampglow, and the DSS process can deal with hot pixels without the darks. This is going to take some experimenting.

And onto last night. I got EQMOD fully working now, but I'll write that up seperately as there's more to it. Suffice to say, I used the EQMOD goto and landed NGC4088 bang in the middle of the chip without having to reposition. I captured 12 x 6 minute useable subs, and here's the results without darks.



and cropped



the background isn't as nice, and the stack had a green tint to it. This needs some more work and probably a restack. Still it was good to get, and you can see the supernova in the heart of NGC4088 to.