UPDATE 02. Jan. 2023 ##############################Since this is a special object to me, I always wanted to give it a reprocessing when I am more experienced. Here is what I did:
- AstroPixelProcessor: Stacking; Crop; Remove Light Pollution (RGB & Ha)
- PixInsight: BlurXTerminator (RGB & Ha)
- AstroPixelProcessor: HSL selective color; Stretching (1x high & 1x low stretch for RGB; 1 middle stretch for Ha )
- Photoshop: combine the two RGB stretches (to highlight the faint tidal debris while not overexposing the core); StarXTerminator (RGB & Ha); NoiseXTerminator (RGB); fine tune the stretch and colors with CameraRawFilter; RED-HALPHA starless continuum subtraction, to get a smooth Ha image, "Screen" Ha over RGB; selective sharpening via masks; include stars with "Linear Dodge (Add)" and increase their saturation
Next Steps will be a gradual switch to PixInsight processing and learn: DBE -> RGB combine -> BXT -> Spectrophotometric Calibration -> Hyperbolic Strech -> NXT -> SXT
Here is a comparison between my old and new processing (low resolution gif):
[b]##############################################[/b]
Ever since I saw a friends picture of the famous Whirlpool Galaxy, it became one of my longtime favorites! I saw the picture from
@Yannick Akar, two years before I started astrophotography. I remember that I immediately run to my wife and yelled: "HE EVEN CAPTURED COLLIDING GALAXIES!!!11"
When I started this hobby 6 month ago, I already decided to save this special object until I am ready. During the last few month I trained the most common capturing & processing techniques. I bought new equipment and improved my setup nearly on a daily basis (to the big sorrow of my bank account
). After many wasted nights with the struggle of guiding, back-focus, adjustment, etc i finally got some decent results. And then finally, three weeks ago - after i captured "C7" as a test object for my new guiding cam - I new I was ready!
This DSO is my very first "Project". I captured during 6 nights and processed and edited over the course of 3 days. It is a very special project to me... therefore I didn't immediately upload it. Instead I decided to pull a little "show" ;-)
Solely for this project, I read into video editing and tried to create a real "experience" associated with our swirly friend.
Please find the video under the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6X0EBG5hbISince I spend so much time with this project, I deeply analyzed all of it's content. I found a total number of
33 galaxies in this frame (all validated with SDSS data). One galaxy happens to have a distance of > 2 BILLION light years, which makes it the furthest object I ever knowingly captured
About M51 - Whirlpool GalaxyThe main galaxy (NGC 5194) and it's interacting companion (NGC 5195) are approximately 30 million light years distant. They are 80.000 light years across and consist of over 100 billion stars. M51b may have passed the disk of the main Galaxy (M51a) 600 million years ago. As a result of gravitational and tidal forces the spiral arms have been dissolved in chaotic structures, leaving only the bright bulge intact. The collision of galaxies can take up to several billion years and results in a completely newly shaped galaxy which eventually forms new spiral arms. The same fate will strike our Milky-way and it's closest neighbor (M31 - Andromeda Galaxy) in about 3 billion years.
Even if it looks like a brutal and hectic mess.... the chances that stars actually collide during this interaction is vanishingly small, given the unimaginable vast and empty space. A civilization on a given planet might not even notice what's going on during the span of their existence (... like we barely noticed that the earth is rotating with 1670 km/h... and leaping with 100.000 km/h around the sun... which is rotating with even greater speed around the center of our galaxy... which itself is accelerating... in an expanding universe.)
But despite it's beauty, M51 is from great scientific importance. It is one of the closest galaxies with an active core (and a black hole in it's center). It has exceptional active starbirth regions which already let us observe 3 super novae! All in all, the Whirlpool Galaxy is a
big deal
Comments