M51, LRGB

[Shibby]

Hello, everyone. Sorry for yet another M51 but it's always an enticing target, being so high in the sky and I haven't tried it with my current setup.

It's been more than a year now since my last post - I've had a bit of a break from the hobby due to various reasons, including the recent birth of our daughter! Baby + astronomy = one very tired dad 😴 One victim of this equation was my Hα layer, which was taken with the Bahtinov mask in place! 🤦‍♂️

So this is an LRGB image which I've processed with very basic techniques in Photoshop. I decided to get decent amount of RGB to try and bring out the fainter colour in the background fuzzies etc. The RGB layer turned out almost as strong as the luminance layer! 
However, this is far from the best M51 you'll see - I really don't know how others achieve so much impressive detail. I threw away a lot of luminance subs that were taken before I drift aligned, which helped improve the detail but only so much. Perhaps I need to revisit collimation.

Atik 460ex
Skywatcher MN190

L: 32x600s
RGB: 3x15x600s
Calibration: Flats only
(Total: 12.8 hours)

Thanks for looking!

[Dragon_Astro]

Really nice, natural looking.

Not overdone it with the processing at all

[Shibby]

Thanks! Here's a tighter crop:

[MarkAR]

Good detail and great colour balance, well done.