M51 New Years bonus and a main event Catalina failure

[Brent]

Returning home at 2am on Friday morning I set up (my first time out in 7 weeks) with the hope of getting a decent image of Catalina.

As the comet would be behind my tree until about 5am I started grabbing data on M51 and managed 85 mins of 300s subs at ISO800.

It hadn't seemed a particularly good night seeing wise but I ended up with my sharpest data yet on this subject. Quite happy with it, but, as always, it needs at least another couple of hours to get the noise down.

It's a 2x drizzle and processed in PS. No calibration files but I used an artificial flat.

So, Catalina had climbed out of the tree and I started a short run - unfortunately, high cloud had started to move in now, (very noticeable around the moon)

I plowed on with 8 subs of 2 min each but had to admit defeat on checking the images.

Only 3 subs were of high enough quality to use (and they were still questionable), so here it is, complete with stacking defects :

Hoping to get a real shot at it if the cloud ever clears again!

Thanks for looking.

[Mark62]

Nice capture well done for only 3 subs [emoji106]

[laudropb]

Nice M51. At least you managed to capture the comet. Still poring rain here.

[Brent]

Nice capture well done for only 3 subs [emoji106]

Better then mine

He he [emoji6]

Mark

 

Ha, yes, it's back to that here now.

Nice M51. At least you managed to capture the comet. Still poring rain here.

Thanks. I guess I should be grateful to get something!

[wimvb]

Nice M51 with great detail.

[Brent]

Nice M51 with great detail.

Cheers.

I did a re-process from scratch with the Star Tools demo. There's no save feature in the demo so this is a low resolution screen grab, and I didn't protect the background and stars which is why they are bigger.

I'm not entirely sure which I prefer but maybe less saturation is better?

And the original Photoshop version again for comparison:

Any thoughts much appreciated.

[wimvb]

Good rework. I agree, the less satureated version is more pleasing to me as well. Also the "edge" on the upper part of the galaxy is less pronounced. While this edge apparantly is part of the structure and not an imaging artefact, it seemed to me too dominant in the original.

Thanks for sharing

[MARS1960]

The original was very good, the re-process is great.

[Uranium235]

Nice shot! Its just reminded me of that interesting news item I saw today about the M51 companion galaxy "burping" Ha from its black hole (no, thats not a euphemism!...lol).

[Brent]

The original was very good, the re-process is great.

Thanks!

Nice shot! Its just reminded me of that interesting news item I saw today about the M51 companion galaxy "burping" Ha from its black hole (no, thats not a euphemism!...lol).

Thanks. I must admit, that item brought more of my attention to that part of the image - very timely!

Good rework. I agree, the less satureated version is more pleasing to me as well. Also the "edge" on the upper part of the galaxy is less pronounced. While this edge apparantly is part of the structure and not an imaging artefact, it seemed to me too dominant in the original.

Thanks for sharing

Yes, I still need to remind myself that very often, less is more!

[Davey-T]

Chance to catch them both in one image on the 14th

Dave