Whirlpool with a 414

[MattJenko]

After a little hiatus in producing images because of an investigation into some rather unfortunate Oiii halos and also playing around with a friends RC6, I am back taking actual data subs with my little Atik 414ex and ED80. This image was a single night's session after being at the FA cup semi final all day, so rather worse for wear on my return to Essex. I now also realise that just because a target is directly overhead doesn't mean it will be easy to image.

I know there are a few M51s at the moment and some extraordinarily good ones at that: now here is mine!

SW ED80, Atik 414ex, HEQ5 : 1 x 10 min B , 6 x 10 min G+R, 13 x 10min L. All processed in PixInsight.

[kalasinman]

Very nice, as usual. I like the colors, wish I could do as well. How did you get on with the RC?

[red dwalf]

Blue has come out very well with just 1 x 10 min sub.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Really lovely shot. The colour and the extent of the tidal tails is exquisite.

[The Jackal]

Very very nice. I love the wirlpool look. 

[MattJenko]

Thanks! I was lucky to get a single Blue channel, 5 were easy throwaways due to awful tracking directly overhead. The survivor was not a particularly good on either but it came out nicely in the end. Had a few goes at processing this, as it was tricky to tease out the tidal tail without leaving lots of noise in it.

The RC was harder to get to grips with than I imagined, but was good fun. I might write a new post about it, but there are some good RC6 threads anyway. The basics are I had to take collimation seriously and took a few goes to get that right. I was a bit taken aback by how slow the native F9 is in reality and I would get myself a motorfocuser + reducer if I was going to get one. It is a lovely little size through and a very nice scope.

[Stephen Green]

 That is a nice image

  Stephen