M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy (Michel Makhlouta)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4263 · IC 4278 · M 51 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · Whirlpool galaxy

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M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

It is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, some 31 million light-years away from Earth.

The Whirlpool Galaxy is interacting with a smaller companion, NGC 5195 (Messier 51b), a dwarf galaxy connected to its larger neighbour by a tidal bridge of dust. The bridge is visible in images of the pair silhouetted against the central region of the smaller galaxy.

The tidal interaction with NGC 5195, which was not discovered until the advent of radio astronomy, has considerably enhanced the spiral structure of the Whirlpool Galaxy. Astronomers believe that it is also triggering waves of new star formation. The interaction leads to compression of hydrogen gas which, in turn, leads to formation of stellar nurseries. The two galaxies will eventually merge, but it will take another few passes for the merger to be complete, which will likely take hundreds of millions of years.

Some personal background details:

I was avoiding going back to the newtonian due to the guiding requirements and the bad shape my mount is in. After some hypertuning, I am finally able to get to a guiding close enough to my imaging scale. So here's the first image for 2019 using the newtonian.

I had to drop all my red frames from that night due to some weird diagonal light streaks in both directions. My suspicion is that before the meridian flip, the neighbor's lights were reflecting inside the tube. And only Red was imaged pre flip. Rewind 1 week, I went for my first field AP event and only got 30 minutes of Red and nothing else, which was used instead.

Clear Skies!

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Distribution of astrophotographers

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
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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
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Star trails
Northern lights
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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
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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.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2695020
PixInsight job	6BDLRPFESMS054X5X1P0M8DEOBFYW7XO
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	13h29m52s.268
RA (top/left)	13h30m10s.245
RA (top/right)	13h32m35s.852
RA (bottom/right)	13h29m33s.912
RA (bottom/left)	13h27m09s.549

Dec (center)	+47°11′36″.63
Dec (top/left)	+46°41′59″.21
Dec (top/right)	+47°22′25″.44
Dec (bottom/right)	+47°41′15″.42
Dec (bottom/left)	+47°00′32″.60

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M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

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Image Index:

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M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy

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