M51 - 90min

[ONIKKINEN]

45x 120s in decent seeing:

Half of the data is from dawn with brightening skies so a very limited set of data in terms of SNR. Managed to pull something out of it anyway.

The stars are a mess but a sharp mess as FWHM of the stacked image is somewhere between 2.3-2.8'' . Hope to get more data in good seeing one day to increase the integration time to something that requires fewer compromises, but as this is the last week of the season we are probably looking at galaxy season 2024 for that! Squeezing out every available minute this week for short images until the summer break...

Edited April 17, 2023 by ONIKKINEN

[tomato]

Great result from 90 mins of integration.👍

[Sunshine]

That's a beautiful image! colours so subtle and contrasty.

[ONIKKINEN]

56 minutes ago, Sunshine said:

That's a beautiful image! colours so subtle and contrasty.

Thank you!

Colour calibration in this case was just manual fiddling in Photoshop as automated tools didn't do the trick at least the way i wanted them to.

1 hour ago, tomato said:

Great result from 90 mins of integration.👍

Thank you, was surprised to see it come out so clean despite the short time and dawn creeping in. Skies before dawn were the darkest i have imaged in yet at SQM 21.3 so there is that.

[Coco]

@ONIKKINEN superb for such a small amount of captured data.

[Astroscot2]

A beautiful image of M51 & companion !

 

Mark

[900SL]

On 17/04/2023 at 23:31, ONIKKINEN said:

45x 120s in decent seeing:

Half of the data is from dawn with brightening skies so a very limited set of data in terms of SNR. Managed to pull something out of it anyway.

The stars are a mess but a sharp mess as FWHM of the stacked image is somewhere between 2.3-2.8'' . Hope to get more data in good seeing one day to increase the integration time to something that requires fewer compromises, but as this is the last week of the season we are probably looking at galaxy season 2024 for that! Squeezing out every available minute this week for short images until the summer break...

Nice image indeed Oskari!

Good to meet you the other evening! (Hauska tutustua keskiviiko ilta! )

The stack on the Wizard didn't come out so good even dumping the first frames, the seeing and LP from Helsinki seemed to affect the Oiii, but I got something.

Finnish language class was difficult on Wednesday after 3 hrs sleep (kolme Kello )

 

 

 

[ONIKKINEN]

Reprocess:

Turned BlurXT and NoiseXT to 11, i think this is all there is to take from the data (for now anyway). Higher resolution too on this one. Stars are still ugly and i cant figure out how to un-ugly them from this set of data with some tube current/dew/humidity issues. Should be an easy fix once i get to shooting another set of data of M51 one day which is bound to happen.

[Radec]

Superb image, especially for a short-ish integration