The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51, is a famous interacting grand-design spiral galaxy. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and is about 31 million light-years (9.5 Mpc) away from Earth. The interaction between M51 and its companion galaxy NGC5195 results in a variety of tidal features. It also has star formation areas, showing plenty of gas and dust under long exposure.
I spent some time in processing the star formation areas around the spiral arms, since the common way of using BlurXTerminator does not work well but somehow generates "sticky" stars. I applied BTX to the stars only, and slight BTX (less than 25%) on the galaxy. Then I used my own AI-based process to enhance the star formation areas using a hand-drawn mask. I specially developed an DNN inference plugin (based on NVIDIA TensorRT) for PixInsight (
https://github.com/Johnny-Astro/TRTInference-PixInsight). My experimental DNN was trained using some high-resolution galaxies images (from HST) with star formation features. The experiment provides not perfect but better result than using only BXT.
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