Going deep from Bortle5 - 48h LRGB M106

We've had clear skies for a good week now, which is extremely unusual from Belgium. What started out as "the first object for the week" became "the only object of the week" in my longest exposure project thus far.

I'm temporarily working with the smaller 14cm F/3.5 Lichtenknecker FFC telescope (a pretty exotic thing, but with a lovely wide flat field for its fast aperture, without extra correctors) rather than the 50cm F/4 behemoth - it wasn't mounted when the quarantine started and I can't get the three people necessary to mount it together right now in a safe and legal manner. The one advantage is that my current setup (tiny scope on a massive mount) laughs in the face of the relatively strong winds we've had.

So... for 8 days (non-consecutive, but close) I just started Sequence Generator Pro every evening and let it take 60s frames at gain 76, in an L-L-L-R-G-B pattern, dithering every 6 frames - since M106 is well-placed the entire night, this gave me over 2800 individual frames, half Luminance, half R/G/B.

Two days of processing further, the end result is in and I'm *very very* happy - this is certainly my deepest image with the 14cm telescope by far, though I haven't yet tried to measure the limiting magnitude.

I'm still collecting some H-alpha data as well, to hopefully add onto the stack later. You can check out the full resolution image on Flickr