M51 lies 31M light years from us, in Canes Venatici. This familiar yet endlessly interesting galaxy is a grand-design spiral, with one of its great arms apparently being tugged by NGC 5195, the small and more yellow galaxy below it in this image.
This is my first attempt at a monochrome image, and I find it interesting to compare it to an OSC image I captured about a year ago with roughly similar integration time, posted
here. The HII regions are more prominent and were so from the time I completed ChannelCombination, so I hesitate to attribute it to processing. At the same time, the OSC image is noticeably sharper. That's not due to oversharpening. I used no sharpening tool there, except for the indirect sharpening of BlurXterminator. On the other hand, this image received some gentle applications of UnsharpMask.
As I am new to mono, I relied heavily on the LRGB broadband and luminance workflows at
chaoticnebula.com and found them very helpful.
Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.
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