M51 Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici (Mike Bleiweiss)

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 Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici

It is a bit early in the year to be imaging this, but this is one of my favorite things in the sky. Interacting galaxies in general fascinate me.

This is 130 subs at 80 seconds each taken in one-shot color, calibrated with 20 flat frames and 20 dark frames. Debayered in PIPP, stacked in DeepSkyStacker, processed in Photoshop for levels/stretching/crop/gradient removal. Bortle 7 skies on a near-new-moon night. Absolutely beautiful night in general for backyard astronomy, good transparency, no clouds, but poor seeing conditions.

I had a lot of trouble with the calibration frames this time. I also feel like I need to start using filters for the really bad sky glow I have to deal with here, like an Optolong L-Pro but haven't quite wrapped my head around getting that into my optical path (adapters, etc - using off-axis guider with M48 everything). So far I'm doing mostly okay with removing it in post processing.

This was taken in RAW 16 bit but for some reason I ended up with very little data in the end result, final images are usually around 15MB this one was 5MB (though LOTS of sky glow was stripped out). My debayered RAWs were the same usual size though each frame about 55MB.

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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.

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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.
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4142255
PixInsight job	PXB493MDG1D1GXHI3Q2VWD9ACPIHLIQU
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	13h29m54s.685
RA (top/left)	13h31m27s.311
RA (top/right)	13h32m03s.712
RA (bottom/right)	13h28m20s.423
RA (bottom/left)	13h27m48s.781

Dec (center)	+47°12′27″.92
Dec (top/left)	+46°42′40″.77
Dec (top/right)	+47°38′11″.33
Dec (bottom/right)	+47°42′12″.60
Dec (bottom/left)	+46°46′44″.87

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy in Canes Venatici

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