M51 Whirlpool Galaxy (Woodbine)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: HD117403 · HD117815 · HD118019 · IC 4263 · IC 4277 · IC 4278 · M 51 · NGC 5169 · NGC 5173 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · NGC 5198 · NGC 5229 · Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

Revision title: Drizzle 2x

Powered byPixInsight

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

Revision title: Drizzle 2x

After months of cloud and rain in the UK, I finally had a beautiful clear moonless night and was able to capture around 5 hours of decent exposures on M51. I would have loved to get another night, but the clouds poured in at dusk the following day.

I used GHS to stretch the image. I'm still struggling to master it, but even with my clumsy efforts it is producing great results with more control than I have managed with other stretching tools.

Original
Final
B

B

Title: Drizzle 2x

Description: This is my first attempt to improve resolution through drizzle. I used 2x drizzle with drop-shrink 0.7 in Pixinsight. I hadn't expected much improvement, but the results were dramatic. The HWFM reduced by 10% in the raw data, which didn't blow me away at first, but as I worked through the process flow, everything worked better and more easily and the image quality kept pulling away from the un-drizzled data. As an example, there were many saturated pixels in the undrizzled data, but none in the drizzled (max was around 0.65), which I didn't expect. Then DBE completely flattened the background in the drizzled data, but a gradient stubbornly remained in the undrizzled. The effect of BlurXterminator on the drizzled data was frankly incredible. I don't fully understand why this was happening, but I'll be drizzling all my data with this rig in future and plan to re-process the data I already have to see what improvements I can obtain.

Uploaded: ...

Trevinca Skies

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7614605
PixInsight job	VOSW08YBBVYIE8PXA7P9R833RRU05LAR
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h30m00s.84
RA (top/left)	13h36m30s.32
RA (top/right)	13h22m32s.84
RA (bottom/right)	13h23m44s.96
RA (bottom/left)	13h37m17s.59

Dec (center)	+47°11′35″.2
Dec (top/left)	+48°06′33″.2
Dec (top/right)	+47°51′30″.2
Dec (bottom/right)	+46°15′17″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+46°29′50″.9

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

Revision title: Drizzle 2x

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

Revision title: Drizzle 2x

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

Revision title: Drizzle 2x

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

Revision title: Drizzle 2x

Equipment

Acquisition details

Description

Comments

Revisions

B

Sky plot

Histogram

In these public groups

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