a good night with some new to me kit m51

[Daniel-K]

i had some new bits delivered QHY5 and a cls filter so blessed with clear skies i could not resist, i got a decent m42 for just 50 min worth of data, then went over to m106 and spent 2 hours on that till m51 was high enough, still trying to get the feel for the fast scope, theres still something about the collimation though i cant nail.

so heres 1.5 hours on M51 the darks were from another set the camera is taking matching darks as we speak and i will take decent flats tomorrow but i just wanted to see what the data was like and im pleased

[long_arms]

Wow!

That is already a beautiful image. I would love to image this one day (just need a camera first )

Its also nice to see an M51 that hasn't been cropped much (I assume)

Dan

[chrislj74]

Great picture! I have yet to get a picture that good.

[Mark72]

This looks nice for 1,5 hours Daniel,

May be a bit of noise reduction but I do not see you need flats here.

Mark

[Daniel-K]

restacked with matching darks. flats are old i plan on taking on my days off so i have left the camera in the scope till then. this looks a bit better but im wondering if the short time i have left in between my subs is causing me my issues with noise? do i need to get pixinsight? how good is it on dslr data?

any tips trick or help would be great

Dan da man

[SnakeyJ]

Dan - a beautiful image and nice to see such a widefield. The coma corrector certainly does its job - is this the standard SW or the new Aplanatic coma corrector?

[Daniel-K]

Dan - a beautiful image and nice to see such a widefield. The coma corrector certainly does its job - is this the standard SW or the new Aplanatic coma corrector?

this is just the SW one i may sell this one though and get the dedicated one, although this does cover all my chip to the corners. the image is a slight crop to take way the black edges but its probably 80% of the fov

[Gina]

Great start, already a lot of detail there for a relatively short time - very nice indeed It's good to see an old friend back again too - I did quite a lot on M51 last year but with some lovely new kit now I can hardly wait

[Mark72]

PixInsight is always great on insufficient data. On sufficient data you just stretch it and send to APOD:)

Here you have a noisy background. If you have PS you can just deal with it there,

Mark

[Chris]

Thats a brilliant start Dan I especially like the second version! amazing signal for the time spent so far I spent 5.5 hours last year on M51 with my Wo66 and my image isn't much deeper than your 1.5 hours! M51 is my favourite galaxy so I'm very much looking forward to going to town on it with my f/5 200p at 1000mm focal length:)

[Daniel-K]

heres a x3 drizzle a bit harsh but it was rushed and i need sleep before i start on nights, i must need more darks theres 18 lights 37 darks@ 300secs iso 800 and 20 flats. the seeing must have dropped off cause theres a fair bit of noise

[Gina]

Nice one More data would help reduce the noise.

[Daniel-K]

had another go this time using quick mas and a bit of noise reduction, i think its came out ok. theres a image of my histogram i reckon thats the most i can get out of the image without the noise kicking in too much, what do you think? im struggling with noise in the color areas

Dan

[Gina]

Yes, that's better

[Chris]

Thats looking very good Dan:)

[Daniel-K]

Thanks chris & Gina just hope I can get a full night on this in the some time near future.one thing I hate is noise I need to do some studying on reduction methods

[andyo]

Great image Dan and nice colour.I use imagenomic noiseware plugin for photoshop which I think is a decent bit of software