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 With Excellent Seeing, Kevin Morefield
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M51 With Excellent Seeing

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M51 With Excellent Seeing, Kevin Morefield
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M51 With Excellent Seeing

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Whether you've learned new techniques, gotten better equipment or just had some special nights, there are a handful of objects that you always want to keep improving on. M51 is one of those. Finding myself with some excellent seeing, including a 0.8" period one night, I gave the Whirlpool Galaxy another try.

Guider RMS error got as low as .15" and FWHM got down to 1.48" on the best subs. That's about 2.5 pixels with my setup. I'm really pleased with the resolution but I had hoped to capture more of the faint dust streams. At F7.2 and Bortle 3, this may not be the best location and equipment for that. Or maybe I'm not processing The dim details competently? Well, we always need something to improve on I guess.

The sharpest subs were integrated separately to produce both a "Sharpest"- and "All"-sub channel masters. Two super-luminance masters were created, one for the Sharpest set and one for the all set. Deconvolution was applied in CCDStack to both super-luminance masters with further sharpening in CCDStack done to the Sharpest. These were combined using luminance masks in Photoshop. This process kept the background mostly noise free and retained as much detail as possible in the galaxy.

30 Hours of LRGB were used, split about 50/50 between L and RGB. A further 17 hours of Ha was added to both the Luminance and RGB channels.

The QHY600M was in high gain mode 1 and gain 56. I used 300 seconds subs for the LRGB and 600 second subs for the Ha.

Comments

Revisions

    M51 With Excellent Seeing, Kevin Morefield
    Original
    M51 With Excellent Seeing, Kevin Morefield
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    M51 With Excellent Seeing, Kevin Morefield
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  • Final
    M51 With Excellent Seeing, Kevin Morefield
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E

Description: bring up the yellow a bit

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F

Description: reduce saturation, raise black point

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G

Description: Still trying to get this right. Re-edited as a SuperLuminanceRGB image with no Ha. Then blended a little of the old HaLRGB in. This seems to be the easiest way to get some additional impact from the Ha without over-doing it.

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Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

M51 With Excellent Seeing, Kevin Morefield

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