M51

[Jarvo]

OK so it's not going to win any awards but I'm pleased with it. It needs a bit more tweaking but I wanted to see if there was any spiral structure to be had before bedtime and early indications are there is.

Stacked in DSS. Curves and Levels adjusted in Gimp. Heavily cropped to remove the star trails.

58 x 60" Lights (Unguided)
10 x 60" Darks

Esprit 100ED / Olympus DSLR

Thanks for looking.

Jarvo

[Demonperformer]

3 hours ago, Jarvo said:

I'm pleased with it

And that, surely, is the most important thing in this hobby.

[tomato]

Good capture, as you say the spiral structure and dust lanes are evident. Not sure if you are using a tracking mount, but if you can improve that the galaxy will be much sharper.

I was trying to image M51 the other night with a small sensor camera and my Telrad was a mile off, with the result that it took the best part of 2 hrs to align on a reference star.

Then the clouds came, meaning I got nothing, I love this hobby!

[cjdawson]

This is one of the many reasons that I love SGPro.  The Auto stretch is showing me what I'm capturing.

M51 has gotta be a popular target tonight.  I'm hoping to have 1 hours worth of LRGB (1 hour per filter) to integrate tomorrow.   Looking forward to seeing what happens with this one.