M51 -- Fun With Hubble (ADBjester)

M51 -- Fun With Hubble

Amazing what a two billion dollar telescope will let you do!

This is data for which I plucked the uncalibrated masters from the Hubble Legacy Archive. This well-known galaxy, Messier 51, was photographed in striking detail by Hubble in January 2005, sadly before the supernova of that year, SN 2005cs.

This image came off of the ACS camera on Hubble from proposal 10452, and consists of a whopping 6 panel mosaic. There is 45 minutes of Blue per mosaic panel, and 25 minutes of red and green per panel. There is additional H-alpha data that I did not integrate, hence the star forming regions aren't standing out in red as they do in many other pictures. (Sorry, I transformed the image to account for the geometric aberration of ACS being off-axis, before thinking to drop in the H-II data. Next time, I'll transform LAST).

The original image is 12000 x 8000 -- 120 MB with best resolution JPG.

This is a fun one to zoom in on at full 100 megapixel resolution, folks! Click on the image, then click on "View All Sizes" in the upper right, then click on Original Size. Wow!

My processing consisted of extracting the RGB planes from FITS Liberator, with a mild DDP stretch on each. I then combined the RGB in CCD Stack, and applied color balance, color saturation, and high pass sharpening techniques in Photoshop, including working in L'ab space for saturating the blue, and luminance brightening in lieu of an actual luminance layer.

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.

Status	n/a
Started	n/a
Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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