M51 Whirlpool Galaxy #13 -- Uncooled on f/9 (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4277 · IC 4278 · M 51 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy #13 -- Uncooled on f/9

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy #13 -- Uncooled on f/9

This is an old favorite -- this particular image is my 13th attempt at it -- but I haven't done it in a while, and figured it would be a good candidate for a very not-ideal setup: a GSO Ritchey-Chretien 6" f/9 telescope with an uncooled ZWO ASI183MC. That is a slow focal ratio with an uncooled camera, which is not the ideal situation, but I'm waiting to swap in my ZWO ASI294MC Pro cooled camera until I'm done with a few targets on the Rokinon lens it's currently sitting on.

Despite all this, I'm quite pleased with how this came out! A decent amount of noise, but I'm very pleased with the detail that BlurXterminator was able to tease out, applying some "smart" deconvolution. I did have to get a lot of exposure time on it though to get a reasonable SNR -- it ended up at 17 hours stacked at the end of the day, although I want to stack smaller amounts and see how little one could get away with. You know, for science!

M51 is located 31 million lightyears away, up off the end of the handle of the Big Dipper in the northern sky. While it looks like M51's companion, NGC 5195, is being eaten by the Whirlpool, that's not quite the case -- the two have passed through each other at least a few times, The gravitational interaction is what has generated the tidal "plumes" off the side of NGC 5195.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7465186
PixInsight job	0PMV4KA4983RNZPI4M4BBF79K4RMR3Y9
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h29m52s.311
RA (top/left)	13h30m47s.730
RA (top/right)	13h30m40s.516
RA (bottom/right)	13h28m56s.556
RA (bottom/left)	13h29m04s.741

Dec (center)	+47°11′57″.82
Dec (top/left)	+46°57′33″.12
Dec (top/right)	+47°27′07″.12
Dec (bottom/right)	+47°26′20″.70
Dec (bottom/left)	+46°56′46″.51

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy #13 -- Uncooled on f/9

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy #13 -- Uncooled on f/9

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy #13 -- Uncooled on f/9

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy #13 -- Uncooled on f/9

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