M51

[astro mick]

Hi.

Had a go at M51 using a 80mm ED refractor,and MX camera.

9x 600 secs Lum.

6x600 secs RGB.

No Darks,but Flats applied.

First time i,ve taken and used Flats,but i think they,ve worked quite well.

Cant see any faults in background.

High intermittant cloud.

Wished i,d binned RGB at 2x2,to pull out more colour.

Thanks.

Mick.

[Uranium235]

Your flats have worked well there Mick so its a good result, but you had room to drop the background levels a bit, and the red channel was slightly mis-aligned in the histogram. Just done a quick tweak with some levels and hlvg (hastalavista green).

Not sure if binning would be the answer on M51, especially with an ED80, but it bins well on large nebuale.

[x6gas]

Nice capture - and looking very good with Uranium's tweaks...

[SlipperySquid]

Looking great there Mick! Coming along nicely with the processing side. As uranium stated the reds where to high but the flats are working nicely. I bet yo uwondered why you didn't use them before, I know I did

Keep banging out the images mate, yo uare doing well!

Clear skies,

Matt.

[Moon monkey]

That looks great well done....

Is that another galaxy just below and to the right ? looks like a tiny sideways on smudge ....

Cheers MM

[Chris]

I wish mine looked that good! nice job

[Zul]

Nice image! Great job!

[JohnC64]

Is that another galaxy just below and to the right ? looks like a tiny sideways on smudge ....

Yup Astrometry.net picks it up as IC4263. And also NGC 5198 lurking in the top right hand side :icon_salut: Top notch astro_mick - Three for the price of one there!!

Cheers John

[astro mick]

Thanks eveyone for your kind replies.Thanks also to Uramium for pulling more out of the image.I had,nt realised about the red data,but i did keep the background light,in order to try retain the faint Galaxy.However it is still seen under a darker background

Hi Matt.The flats are working really well,and yes i do wish i,d used earlier.Just couldn,t seem to obtain good ones.

You,ve been fairly quite recently,nodoubt your working on some Hubble Pallette master piece.

Weather does,nt look good this week,we can only hope.

Mick.

[SlipperySquid]

Hiya Mick,

It's really good to see that you are still banging at it, I had a bit of a hiccup because I was going to sell up and chuck the hobby due to lack of time but I ahve decided to image when I can instead of trying to get outside everytime there was a clear sky it's working much better that way done one image recently that's on the forum but stuck for new targets as my mount wont take my larger scope at the moment so in the process of getting the bits together for an obsy!

Take care mate, your imaging is progressing really nicely!

Clear skies

Matt.