M51 from Urban Guildford

[PortableAstronomer]

Hello, I thought I'd see what PixInsight LE can do to salvage detail in some horrendously poor viewing conditions.

Megrez 90, WO FFIII, QHY8

Guided with Equinox 80 + QHY5 + PHD

EQ6 mount + EQMOD + StellariumScope

Processing:

DeepSkyStacker (Sigma Kappa)

PixInsight LE : Dynamic Background Extraction, "Power of Inverse Pixels" (PIP) transform, Curves adjustmet, Some A-trous wavelet tweaking. Then cleaned up using SGBNR on the dark areas (selective gaussian blur noise reduction) through a mask.

There are much better pics of this galaxy around on here, but I think PixInsight has done a pretty good job in awful viewing conditions.

Regards, Chris

[PortableAstronomer]

Obvously the resulting image is very noisy.

All the capture and the processing was recorded on video; it would be great if I could attach video to these pics (trouble is it comes to about 20mb).

Our local club does monthly viewing sessions in the hills but they're often spoiled by teenagers in their cars or visits from the police. At least this urban location was safe & secure.

[Beyond_Vision]

It's a great program and your picture shows how powerful it is. It's a real shame about the youths spoiling your viewing sessions.

Regards

Kevin

[Neil27]

Great effort considering the original data and viewing conditions.

[Glasspusher]

Excellent, I have been struggling with M51 under similar conditions but have not produced anything of this quality!!

John

[PortableAstronomer]

Here you go. Video of how M51 was done.

Astro processing of M51 and M81/82 with DeepSkyStacker PixInsight LE

Also in the July edition of Astronomy Now there's a picture of M81/M82 from my mate Andy Lee, who was also present at the time when we were imaging that night. This video also shows some of what was behind that M81/M82 pic. I'll do a proper one later on M81/M82.

Enjoy.

Chris