First M51 - can anyone improve?

[Mr niall]

Managed to get a little bit done on Saturday night before clouds rolled in and ruined everything. Looks like I’ve got the alignment issues sorted though so that’s a plus, and my new mini bahtinov worked well too.  Image is fairly unspectacular, needed more subs and definitely would have benefitted from flats. But... onwards and upwards!

opinions / criticisms welcome - I’ve included the tiff in case anyone wants to prove / disprove whether I’ve done ok with average data or whether I’ve messed up royally!

DSS and Lightroom. 

canon Eos 1300d

75-300 @300mm

20x100 lights

20x100 darks

cropped by about 2/3

dss output.TIF

[ronl]

That's a very nice image, considering the Whirlpool galaxy is located 26 million light years

away , you have done a great job.

[SteveNickolls]

Hi,

Here's a much cropped area of the original using StarTools.

Cheers,
Steve

[Mr niall]

7 minutes ago, SteveNickolls said:

Hi,

Here's a much cropped area of the original using StarTools.

Cheers,
Steve

Wow that’s fab - I tried startools, seemed to keep going wrong / crashing my computer!

[wornish]

Cropped and then processed in Pixinsight.

Stars pretty round.

M51 is a very small target for your kit this is a very severe crop.