Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  IC 4263  ·  IC 4278  ·  M 51  ·  NGC 5169  ·  NGC 5194  ·  NGC 5195  ·  NGC 5198  ·  Whirlpool galaxy
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A Lonely Messier 51 (LRGB), Linda
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Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
A Lonely Messier 51 (LRGB), Linda
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Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

This is the first cut of an attempt at M51. M51 is a bit small for my 80mm F/6 refractor but is one of the few targets accessible at home this time of year, at least until fairly late in the short early summer nights.

It is only a total of three hours of data and poor blue has only 16 minutes. I'm hoping to supplement all channels on the next clear night but especially blue.

My goal was to preserve as much detail as I could while getting rid of as much noise as I could. I may have crossed the line on this but with more data I can hopefully be a bit gentler with it. The image is fairly heavily cropped

Processing steps:

Luminance:
Mure Denise
DBE
MLT (noise reduction)
HT

Each RBG:
Mure Denoise
then Channel Combination

RBG:
DBE
PCC
MLT (chrominance & luminance)
ArchsinhStretch
LRBG Combination
TGVDenoise
LHE
SCNR
Curves (contrast & saturation)
Dark Structure Enhance

Comments

Revisions

  • A Lonely Messier 51 (LRGB), Linda
    Original
  • Final
    A Lonely Messier 51 (LRGB), Linda
    C

C

Description: This version adds in the (mostly) missing blue data (now about an hour instead of just 16 minutes). I was hoping to get more luminance data but in my yard M51 is going behind a tree only an hour after twilight ends. I may not have much opportunity to get more. So, instead I combined the existing luminance with all the RGB subs. It seemed to help though I'd have preferred to get at least a couple hours more true luminance data.

Processing was a bit less aggressive on this version:
Mure Denoise
Channel Combination for RBG
Dynamic Crop (RBG & L)
DBE (RBG & L)
PCC (RBG)
HT (RBG & L)
LRBGCombination
LHE (mask for just the galaxy)
CT (color saturation)
TGV Denoise (Luminance & Chrominance)
MLT (mild sharpening)
HT (to bring down black level)

This had much less noise reduction than the last version. It doesn't really stand up for pixel peeping but the illusion of sharpness and detail seems to work well at a reasonable viewing distance.

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Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

A Lonely Messier 51 (LRGB), Linda

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Broadlands