My second DSO - M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

[vincentnm]

Hi All,

This is my second deep sky attempt, the first one being the orion Nebula

Captured on 29th March 2008 with C9.25, Meade F/3.3 CCD Focal Reducer, Modded Canon 350D.

35 subs each of 15 seconds at 1600 ISO.

Stacked in Deepsky Stacker

Levels, Curves, and GradientXTerminator with Photoshop CS2.

Could not really get rid of the light pollution gradient entirely. Pollution was pretty bad, especially with the 4th floor idiot leaving his light on all night. I was trying to follow the tutorial in Practical Astronomer about using GradientXTerminator plugin. Reduced the gradient but not to my satisfaction.

Thanks,

Vincent Morris.

[MikeD]

Nice capture, you have some nice dust lane detail showing and the focus looks tight.

Mike.

[steppenwolf]

Excellent focus with some good detail showing through - colour balance needs a little tweak from red to yellow but you should be very pleased with that, it is not an easy target at all!

[zhgutas]

Very nice m51 Vincent.! hope you don't mind, i've had a bash at evening it up a bit in cs2 , these are the results.

Marius

[Sam]

Looking good Vincent! - the red really comes through with the modded camera.

[jcm]

Good capture , Vincent.

Isolated the galaxy and ran gradient removal tool.

One problem I always have is that images look brighter on this forum than they do on my laptop.

John

[MikeD]

I had a play too( hope you don't mind)

mainly levels and curves( mostly on the red channel)

Mike

[centroid]

Nice work Vincent, and looking all the better for Mike having 'backed off' the red a bit.

Well done!!

Dave

[vincentnm]

Thanks guys for your comments and especially those of you who modded my image.

I have attached a 16 bit tiff here, which may give you more dynamic range than the jpg I had posted earlier. Please feel free to work on it.

http://213.106.110.161/mcs/DS_PS1_GradX_GradX_GradX_Crop3.tif

Mike - Thanks for working on the red, the modded 350 lets in a lot of red. But thats probably why it is super sensitive.

John - Good point about isolating the galaxy and applying the gradient filter. I tried to use the magic wand tool to isolate the galaxy and it failed with an error stating that the wand cannot be used on a 16 bit image!

Marius - How'd you reduce the gradient?

Thanks,

Vincent.