The use of a baffle to hide the moonglow made all the difference. The moon was actually far brighter tonight, and still it was kept under control. This is roughly the same number of subs as the previous night.
M82 is all blown out again, but I'll have proper edits of that within a day or two, as well as better post-edits of this shot; again, I have only taken time to stretch it, and nothing else. In a rush to see what i had, I ended up stacking all subs, and some of them could definitely have been left out; I was dodging contrails much of the night.
This is just a preliminary edit of M82; I will combine the subs from the last two days to produce a more finished one. But it's easy to see that this is a weird place. I'm a bit tickled to be able to get pics of "irregular" galaxies; I've always been fascinated by them.
I've finished the overall stacks from the last two nights, and since we expect clouds for several days I'll have the chance to process each galaxy here individually, while giving the background starfield the treatment it deserves as well. I've heard some people say that exposing different parts of the picture differently is a bit of a cheat-okay, it may be. But if so, then so is using a camera to take exposures longer than our eye can manage. I'm not interested in "composites", where the components of the final picture come from other pictures, but I do think it's fine to process different parts of the frame differently. It's done with film, too; that's why there are tools like Dodge Tool and Burn Tool in Photoshop.
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