Sweetman Astrophotography

Galaxy season is wrapping up soon, and I’m ready for a change. The weather here has been very rainy with the exception of about 4 days over the past month. On two of those nights I attempted to image a galaxy known as the Cat’s Eye galaxy. This is a really tough galaxy to image because it has such high dynamic range. The core is quite bright, but it surrounded by very faint rings. It didn’t help that the only two clear nights came with an 80% moon.

I had two full unsuccessful attempts to stretch this image. Eventually, I got to a place where I felt ok about it. No real breakthroughs, I just spent a lot of time getting the colors balanced, then carefully masked & stretched little by little, increasing the diameter of the masked core area as the saturated area grew with each stretch. Then some final touches on the color saturation, recombined the stars and called it a day.