A quick M51

[wimvb]

While waiting for astro darkness, I aimed my telescope at M51 and collected about 2 hours of data (LRGB), 20 x 2,5 mins L, 10 x 2,5 mins RGB (per channel). Only luminance was collected during astro darkness, but with high clouds.

Simple process in PixInsight.

This object deserves more data, but astro season is coming to an end up here, and I still have an other project I want to finish. Maybe next season.

[mackiedlm]

I really like that. The FOV is really nice, gives the feel of isolation but still with detail and structure in the Galaxy

[wimvb]

Thank you. It is somewhat cropped to exclude a bright star that suffered from the high clouds.

[gorann]

That is really very nice Wim, especially for such a short night!

[wimvb]

18 minutes ago, gorann said:

That is really very nice Wim, especially for such a short night!

Thanks, but this was taken before the "main event", luminance on ngc 3972. Here's the Ekos summary for last night

The timeline panel shows the various events (tracking, guiding, focus and capture). The red, green, blue and white markers before 10 000 (seconds) are the capture events for this M51 image. The other events are capture events for ngc 3972, mostly luminance, but some blue and red towards the end.

The Statistics panel shows guide results. Yellow is SNR, which drops when there are clouds, while white and red are tracking error and RMS. The best sub from the M51 sequence had a guide rms of 0.44", the indicated sub had an RMS of 0.47". Not bad for a skywatcher mount, imo.

You can see from the yellow line in the statistics panel, that there were high clouds during the capture of the M51 data, but that it cleared up at about midnight, when I started collecting ngc 3972 data. The gradual drop in SNR from 3.35 am is caused by twilight. Astro darkness ended just past 2 am, so apparently we can safely capture data an hour or so past that time, which is good news.

[Padraic M]

I hadn't seen that EKOS summary screen before. Very cool! 

Lovely M51 too btw!