Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  HD117815  ·  IC 4263  ·  IC 4277  ·  IC 4278  ·  M 51  ·  NGC 5194  ·  NGC 5195  ·  Whirlpool galaxy
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M51, Giovanni Paglioli
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Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M51, Giovanni Paglioli
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Description

I'm not sure why but, over all these years, I've never got the chance to get enough good data on this subject. For shure I've started imanging this wonderful galaxy many many times with many different optics and ccd's, collecting just few photons each time, with the promise that I will had some entire nights sometimes... Only recently I went to a star party on the mount Amiata in Italy having in mind just that subject for all the nights. Unfortunately we had only few hours of good weather on the first night then the cluods comes in stopping all of us. The setup itself was less than ideal for the subject having short focal lenght but medium per pixel resolution. Once back home I decided to dig out all my datas to see what I could make in the fight for SNR. So I've started to use wide field undersampled images as my base (increasing these images about 150% of their original sizes), then adding more and more images at increasing resolution (scaling them down to match the base image). The small undersampled images halped me a lot in digging out the faint areas with very few spatial details but also with low noise. The high resolution images on the other hand, helped me bringing out more and more fine scale details on the galaxy, without using much of their faint, noisy areas. The resulting image, while still small in size, is quite interesting and enjoyable.

So here it is my M51 galaxy image in the end!

There are also data included from my good friend Fabrizio Farina that was with me on that star party shooting the same target. Thanks a lot Fabrizio!

Thanks all of You if you've readed all these stupid words!!!

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M51, Giovanni Paglioli