Whirlpool Galaxy by a newbie (NeilM)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4263 · M 51 · NGC 5169 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · NGC 5198 · Whirlpool Galaxy

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Whirlpool Galaxy by a newbie

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Whirlpool Galaxy by a newbie

In my 4th night of this new hobby I decided to try and photograph a galaxy, and I picked the whirlpool galaxy because of its good position in the sky right now (July). I knew that I needed more focal length so I decided to try and use my Nikon 200-500mm lens. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get a good polar alignment but the biggest challenge was getting the lens focused at 500mm. There is a hair trigger difference between focused and unfocused. The next issue was that I am still struggling to get the Goto functionality to work properly (and by this I mean to point at things accurately) and therefore accurately pointing at the Whirlpool Galaxy was difficult. I took some test exposures at 15s and made adjustments to get the fuzzy blobs more or less near the centered of the frame. Stacked in Siril with some minor edits in Photoshop.

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8085691
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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Whirlpool Galaxy by a newbie

Whirlpool Galaxy by a newbie

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Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):

Whirlpool Galaxy by a newbie

Whirlpool Galaxy by a newbie

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Sky plot

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