1st attempt at M51

[jnb]

My first attempt at M51 and my first attempt since I analysed what I got wrong on my first attempt at anything with my current scope and camera combination (a quick test run on the Pleiades in hazy conditions let me play with the setup but not the processing). It's only twelve minutes of data and a small scope but I'm not too disappointed with this result at this stage of my experience.

M51 8 x 90 seconds, iso 800, 6" F5 newtonian. Canon 500D. Very quickly processed in deepsky stacker. Quickly processed partly because it was very late and partly because I really don't yet understand the wavelet image enhancement options in registax. Deepsky stacker does a good job of removing vignetting & dust bunnies, removing hot pixels and stacking. Registax is convenient for turning the tiff back to a jpeg but other than that I can't drive registax.

The full details;

All images taken through a skywatcher pds 150 newtonian (150mm F5) with an unmodified canon 500d.

16 x 90s exposures at iso800 of which the best 8 were stacked. Total exposure time 12 minutes.
18 dark frames
17 flat frames (probably badly done when I looked at the histograms later)

Imaging runs at iso400 (10 x 90s) and iso 1600 (16 x 45s) were also taken but I haven't processed those.

 

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Nice first result

[laudropb]

Nice first attempt.