Stack 07 06 11 crop 16 bit part processed

Very nice M51, and a couple of faint ones there too

Cheers.....I should add that it was taken with a Canon 5Dmk2 & an old Olympus manual focus 600mm f6.5 camera lens with Eos-OM adapter. This camera & lens sitting on an EQ6 which was under the control of a laptop running Carte Du Ciel & PHD autoguiding with an ST80 + QHY5. ie the optical imaging side did not involve any 'astro' gear as such......I only started in March 2011, so my post processing takes a lot to be desired too.....

Very impressive image with the equipment you have - certainly gives me something to aim for when I get my act together!

.........& I can't wait to get a decent scope to image with ;-)

.........will be out trying my luck with a Canon 70-200 + converters tonight - daylight back-2-back tests have shown it significantly better than the OM 600mm I've been using......wonder if it will hold the same for night time.

This is a awesome pic, is the one you were working on at Turf hill? I am trying to work out what the fainter galaxies are in the photos, i think the 2 most prominent ones are M63 and M94 but i can see 2 more smaller fainter ones on the left of the pic where the 2 brighter stars are, there's a faint object just above the pinkish coloured star and about half way between the pinkish and the blue star is another object. In fact I have just noticed 2 other objects as well, one is a fuzzy blob that looks like an out of focus star that's to the right of the bright blue star on the left, and if you go up and right from that there is a strange object resembling a tiny pink wotsit.

........no, this was not the subs from that fantastic night at TH - I took the subs you see here on the 24th May from Intech, nr Winchester - a few days before that SN was spotted! These subs were taken through my old Olympus 600mm f6.5 camera lens (on a Canon 5dmk2 with a suitable OM-EOS adapter).

That night at TH I was imaging the same subject but with a different lens combination - I did some daylight back-to-back tests with various kit & discovered that my Canon 70-200L f2.8 IS mk2 plus 2x mk2 & 1.4x mk2 converters gave significantly better results than any of my other kit - with those converters the lens effectively becomes a 560mm f8 - a tad slow for imaging being the downside, just means I have to take more subs ;-)

I've stacked the subs from the TH night, & the stack looks superior to the subs I took on the 24th May with the Olympus lens - with the canon I'm getting much better shaped stars with little violet haloing - I was getting a lot with the Olympus.

Sadly, I have not had time to fully post process the TH stack yet.

......just out of curiosity, I decided to stack all my M51 subs captured from both lens setups - not expecting it to be that great due to the differences, but it looks the best stack to work on surprisingly enough......just goes to show, you almost can't have too much exposure in AP ;-)

When I get time to post process the TH subs, I will post the result to act as a comparison.

.......I'm still amazed what you can do with just a DSLR & camera lens & an astro mount.......& alot of patience!

thanks for the comments