Well after nearly a yearly of experimenting with new equipment and software, learning new techniques and then finally come the eagerly awaited long nights of winter and we get nearly 11 solid weeks of cloud!

Well I have always wanted to capture M51 and do it justice , my previous images haven't set the world on fire, but they are what they are, so this is a small step up thanks to two good friends who have mentored me, its certainly not finished and I still have the Ha to add, and most definitely not in their league, but certainly better than my previous efforts.

I used figures from my G2V experiments and was pleased that they needed no colour calibration from within Pixinsight, but they probably do now!!!

I'll fix what is wrong as time goes by, but for now this is classified as "Work In progress"

I have captured some other good images over the last year, but as my processing wasn't up to scratch I refused to publish what I haven't captured and processed myself.

This represents 4 nights from the 25th March to the 10th April 2019 and the capture are as follows: -

Lum 11 x 600s

Red 11 x 696s

Green 11 x 600s

Blue 11 x 798s

Ha 11 x 600s to be added later

Enough waffling with excuses, here's the bumpf on M51: -

The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51a, M51a, and NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. Its distance is estimated to be between 15 and 35 million light-years.

The galaxy and its companion, NGC 5195, are easily observed by amateur astronomers, and the two galaxies may be seen with binoculars. The Whirlpool Galaxy has been extensively observed by professional astronomers, who study it to understand galaxy structure (particularly structure associated with the spiral arms) and galaxy interactions.