Messier 51 - Whirlpool Galaxy - NGC 5194 (Steve Rosenow)

Messier 51 - Whirlpool Galaxy - NGC 5194

Last night afforded me my first opportunity to do the good ol' Whirlpool Galaxy. Let me tell ya, this sucker's an elusive critter when you don't have a Go-To scope!

After a half hour of tediously looking for it through photo surveys of the Big Dipper handle region, I was about to give up until it showed up on a camera frame. At that point, I fine-tuned the aim via the drive corrector very tediously. After that, I set my camera's ISO to 1600 and began a quick imaging run of about 45 minutes duration, with frames about 5 minutes a piece. I was planning on doing a lot more imaging on it but as luck would have it, my fun was abruptly ended by a fast-rolling fog that covered the sky up in less than 10 minutes. Shot a few darks and flats and called it a night. Went to work processing it the next morning.

I had to crop out a large amount of empty space out of the photo since I shot it with my 500mmmirror lens. It looked rather small on the frame, and I didn't want a lot of empty space in it.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
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.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

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