Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  M 51  ·  NGC 5194  ·  NGC 5195  ·  Whirlpool galaxy
M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in RGB, banzai
M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in RGB
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M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in RGB

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

First real success with mono imaging and first "true color" calibrated result.

The Meade DSI Pro II has a tiny sensor that doesn't do pixel binning so I didn't see the point of doing LRGB imaging with it. Instead this is just RGB with the RGB layer also used as a Luminance layer in Photoshop (desaturate, large contrast increase, blend mode: Luminance).

Dark frame subtraction wasn't helping so instead I compiled them into a bad pixel map. When combined with bias frames I finally got excellent results out of the DSI Pro II.

Captured and processed in Nebulosity (bad pixel mapping, bias, flats; pixel squaring, match hist).

Stacked in DeepSkyStacker (kappa sigma, kappa: 2, iterations: 5)

Color calibration via eXcalibrator (SDSS SExtractor linear): 1.00 : 1.37 : 1.25

RGB combine, background offset, and stretch in Nebulosity.

Post-processing in Photoshop.

Comments

Revisions

  • M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in RGB, banzai
    Original
  • M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in RGB, banzai
    C
  • Final
    M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in RGB, banzai
    D

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy in RGB, banzai