M51 (4inthemorning)

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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M51

M51 8 x 90 seconds, iso 800, 6" F5 newtonian. Canon 500D. Very quickly processed in deepsky stacker. Quickly processed partly because it was very late and partly because I really don't yet understand the wavelet image enhancement options in registax. Deepsky stacker does a good job of removing vignetting & dust bunnies, removing hot pixels and stacking. Registax is convenient for turning the tiff back to a jpeg but other than that I can't drive registax.

The full details;

All images taken through a skywatcher pds 150 newtonian (150mm F5) with an unmodified canon 500d.

16 x 90s exposures at iso800 of which the best 8 were stacked. Total exposure time 12 minutes.

18 dark frames

17 flat frames (probably badly done when I looked at the histograms later)

Imaging runs at iso400 (10 x 90s) and iso 1600 (16 x 45s) were also taken but I haven't processed those.

The uploaded image here is a jpeg so at this image scale a lot of artifacts will be compression effects from the jpeg but the processed tiff image comes out as 88Mb (which is a tad large to upload!)

To be accurate it's really two galaxies, M51 and NGC 5195. M51 is a face on spiral and NGC 5195 is a smaller irregular galaxy. They have passed through each other twice recently. Recently in this case meaning 500 million years ago and 100 million years ago.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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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
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Astrometry.net job	1022918
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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