M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

[AbsolutelyN]

The sky has not been quite as transparent the last two nights so this one took two nights due to bad guiding and the colour was much more difficult. I've gone for a 16-9 crop because I wanted to keep in the little galaxy on the right but not sure if it quite balances. Best viewed bigger as the crop makes the galaxy quite small.

6 hours with 250-PDS and 1600MM. Full res on astrobin - https://www.astrobin.com/h1lzm3/ 

The revision attached show my very first attempt at this galaxy - by chance just happens to be 6 years ago to the day. EOS-M with a Vixen 80SF

Edited April 18, 2021 by AbsolutelyN

[CraigT82]

That's a real belter! Stunning when viewed full sized. What were the exposure lengths for this one? 

[AbsolutelyN]

4 minutes ago, CraigT82 said:

That's a real belter! Stunning when viewed full sized. What were the exposure lengths for this one? 

Thanks Craig. It's just 60 second exposures. The guiding just wasnt good enough to go any longer and out of two full nights about 50% of the frames had to be discarded due to either bad stars or haze. 

Edited April 18, 2021 by AbsolutelyN

[CraigT82]

Well the frames that made it were absolutely spot on! Your stars look perfect to my eye and there are so many faint little galaxies in the background that I haven't really noticed before and would probably just totally disappear with poorer tracking.

Just goes to show what a 'budget' mount and a 'budget' scope can do in the right hands!  👍👍👍

[AbsolutelyN]

4 hours ago, CraigT82 said:

Well the frames that made it were absolutely spot on! Your stars look perfect to my eye and there are so many faint little galaxies in the background that I haven't really noticed before and would probably just totally disappear with poorer tracking.

Just goes to show what a 'budget' mount and a 'budget' scope can do in the right hands!  👍👍👍

Tracking was at best 0.8, it really deserves a better mount. Quite amazing how sky quality makes a big difference too - images earlier in the week were so much easier to get the colour right, this one was awful to colour balance. 

Edited April 18, 2021 by AbsolutelyN

[knobby]

Really nice image 👍🏻

Was this 60 seconds RGB?

Any luminance ?

[Paul M]

That's a very nice image. Sometimes images of M51 that have been processed to bring out the nebulosity can look quite overcooked. This one is very nice and natural; and the detail when I zoomed in was brilliant!

Much better than my recent attempt with my 250 PDS and ASI178 camera. I keep blaming the lackluster performance on the camera not being a good match to the scope. But I think it's the biological component of the imaging train where the problem lies   

[AbsolutelyN]

9 minutes ago, knobby said:

Really nice image 👍🏻

Was this 60 seconds RGB?

Any luminance ?

60 seconds per filter - probably 50% luminance. I find you don't really need that much colour. Did fine with just 20 mins blue the other day

[AbsolutelyN]

4 minutes ago, Paul M said:

That's a very nice image. Sometimes images of M51 that have been processed to bring out the nebulosity can look quite overcooked. This one is very nice and natural; and the detail when I zoomed in was brilliant!

Much better than my recent attempt with my 250 PDS and ASI178 camera. I keep blaming the lackluster performance on the camera not being a good match to the scope. But I think it's the biological component of the imaging train where the problem lies   

Thanks. The 178 pairs very well with the 250pds but I've only used that on mars, might be tricky on deep sky.