Shibby

You've done a great job with the central core! Nice one.

I realised how badly I had combined my channels last time I posted this back in 2018. Holding back on the Ha channel has really brought out some extra structure I had completely destroyed with my previous hap-hazard approach. So here it is again - it's a Bi-Colour combination of Ha and Oiii as a 2 panel mosaic. Acquisition Hα: 2x24x600s Oiii: 2x17x600s Equipment Optics: MN190 Camera: 460ex Mount: AP Mach1GTO Guding: Orion mini 50mm guidescope & QYH5L-ii

Very impressive results for completely untracked capture! What was the actual exposure length of each sub? Must have been very short!

Well my images are total crap then!! Awesome detail and I like the improved colour balance, especially since you improved the stars.

Fantastic result. Great work on the processing! Would love to have a try for the outer shell myself, but not if it requires 23 hours - that'd take me months!

A very fine image! The original seems the best to me, nice and natural. Good to see the difference that registar has made - I normally get the stacking software to align my channels but that's not perfect.

What a fascinating object! Thanks for imaging and posting it.

Really nice. I like very much the colour and carefully handled background field

Nicely done - I know just how difficult this is to process - there's a huge difference in brightness between the core and outer regions. The second version looks very similar to me, on my screen. I'm almost tempted to suggest you've posted the same image twice!?

When drift aligning my mount, I aim for below 4' (that's about 0.07 degrees) however I have a permanent pier and wouldn't want to do that every night!

Very nicely done Olly. Compared to my own attempt at M101 (which also looks too cold in comparison), it shows just how much further the galaxy extends than I thought it did!

Thanks! Here's a tighter crop:

Hello, everyone. Sorry for yet another M51 but it's always an enticing target, being so high in the sky and I haven't tried it with my current setup. It's been more than a year now since my last post - I've had a bit of a break from the hobby due to various reasons, including the recent birth of our daughter! Baby + astronomy = one very tired dad One victim of this equation was my Hα layer, which was taken with the Bahtinov mask in place! So this is an LRGB image which I've processed with very basic techniques in Photoshop. I decided to get decent amount of RGB to try and bring out the fainter colour in the background fuzzies etc. The RGB layer turned out almost as strong as the luminance layer! However, this is far from the best M51 you'll see - I really don't know how others achieve so much impressive detail. I threw away a lot of luminance subs that were taken before I drift aligned, which helped improve the detail but only so much. Perhaps I need to revisit collimation. Atik 460ex Skywatcher MN190 L: 32x600s RGB: 3x15x600s Calibration: Flats only (Total: 12.8 hours) Thanks for looking!

Brilliant stuff Gina!

Hi! There's a lot to love about this image. Really nice, fine detail showing off a great field of interesting galaxies. Perhaps your colour is the more genuine one?