M51 before Moonrise

[centroid]

Not perfect 'seeing' by any means, but a clear sky last night, with the Moon not rising until a bit later.

Decided to have another 'crack' at M51, before the Moon came up.

12" LX200R + f/6.3 Celestron FR. SXVF-H9C and 600sec subs. Processed in AA4.

Dave

[MartinB]

Lots of detail in the dust lanes Dave and the stars look pretty tight as well. How much time did you give it?

[centroid]

80 mins in 8x600 sec subs, then the Moon started to appear so I stopped.

Although the sky was relatively clear, it was a bit hazy, which has obviuosly 'robbed' some of the finer detail, but given the conditions and less subs than I would have liked, I guess its not too bad.

BTW, I remberered to change the orientation of the camera for you.

Dave

[Beyond_Vision]

Nice one Dave I would be more than glad to capture it that well. Some very nice detail in the dust lanes.

Regards

Kevin

[MartinB]

BTW, I remberered to change the orientation of the camera for you.

Perfect!!

[barkis]

That's a corking piece of work Dave, if you say you could improve on it, they may as well decommission the Hubble, and save the expense of another servicing mission. Weeelll, maybe not, but it's still a gold medal shot.

Ron.

[centroid]

Given the right sort of 'seeing' Ron, and a lot more time on it, there's a lot more to come from that particular object.

I'm sure we will see this when Mike (Yfronto), and Martin (MartinB) produce the end result of their ongoing M51 project, which will probably equate to several hours of exposure.

Dave

[MikeD]

Very, very nice result Dave, the colour is spot on and the detail is sweeet.

Don't hold your breath for my attempt at this, last night I managed One 3 min sub before the cloud rolled in.

Mike.

[jgs001]

Very very nice capture Dave

[moondog]

Excellent M52 Dave - love the colour. Your skies last night were obviously pretty good.

Well done

8)

MD

[Sam]

What a superb image. There's a load of detail in that - the dust lanes, the star forming regions - it's all there - very very nice!

Sam

[bazza]

Superb image Dave.

Adam Block has a mind blowing image of M51 and I tell you, yours straight away, brought his to mind....so that may be a measure of how good your M51 is.

http://www.caelumobservatory.com/obs/m51.html

I struggled with the clouds for three hours last night but had to give in to them.

Met office were way off!

Barry.

[CELESCOPE]

Hey thats pretty good Dave fair amount of detail in there mate ,and for only 80 mins its turned out good

Rog

[steppenwolf]

That's good, Dave - this is a surprisingly difficult object to image but you have captured some nice detail.

[SteelRat]

Yup - lots going on in there 8) Nice 51 image Dave.

Cheers

Matthew(SR)

[trudie]

Smashing image Dave.

Trudie