Supernova SN2025rbs

It’s been a while since I imaged this in early August. I’m really happy with how this turned out given all the struggles I had. I managed to get lucky with the weather, and get a smoke free night. Then I had a few self-induced struggles. I forgot to put the IR/Cut filter back in the imaging train which caused the stars to blow up and aggravated an issue with stars spikes that I’ve been struggling with. However, I was able to address these images in post processing relatively easily. The full image is below.

I always separate the stars and primary target for processing anyway and that largely addressed the bloated stars. I made extensive use of SetiAstro’s Blemish Blaster tool to address the star spikes. Finally, I needed to control the brightness of the galaxy core to show the supernova. I accomplished this through the use of range masks and many small stretches. The goal was to pull out detail in the small galaxies of the Stephan’s Quintet(below) while still allowing the supernova to be clearly visible. I’m really happy with how that worked out.