M51 in LLRGB (Tom Gray)

M51 in LLRGB

Revision title: Reprocessed in Siril with AI gradient reduction, sharpening and star resynthesis

After getting in a spin with M101, I have gone back to other data that I collected the same night. M51 was surprisingly easy to process once I had figured out how to align frames in ASTAP - many thanks @Rich-sky. [Interestingly I cannot see the 'export to fits' button at maximum screen resolution (1400x1050) and the program does not appear to be scaling, which may be a function of still using Win32 - no complaints as this is a free and powerful astrometric solver, image analysis and stacking program - but I should report it to the author, Hans Klein]. I worked around this by solving the image and creating a new stack (after backing up the original!) The composite image was aligned but not the individual stacks?

Long story short, processing in Startools was fairly straightforward, although still some lingering gradients, which may possibly be due to light leaking around my filter slide - I expect this has caused the split in the blue in the histogram. I pushed these back, losing a little of the faint tidal tail and outer arm of NGC 5195 and 5194 respectively. Using Lee B's excellent image as an exemplar https://www.astrobin.com/p6bz3p/ I was pleased to see the galaxies IC 4277 and 4278 faintly to the left in my image. Now I just need to calm down, carry on and bag some longer exposures before the nights get too short.

Original
B
Final
C

B

Description: I still wasn't happy with this image which showed alignment errors between the L and RGB channels. Alignment in ASTAP followed by stacking appears to have resolved this and produced a much better image. Seeing was not great and there is some distortion from incorrect backspacing with my Meade f0.63 reducer on my 8" LX5 SCT. I think the colour is better and shows off those lovely blue star forming regions in the whirlpool as a result of the collision between these iconic galaxies.

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C

Title: Reprocessed in Siril with AI gradient reduction, sharpening and star resynthesis

Description: 70 x120s = 140m = 2 hours 20 mins LRGB. Stacked in Siril, gradient removal with GradXpert, Sharpening in Astrosharp, star resynthesis

Uploaded: ...

Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9435541
PixInsight job	ORUNNG6LA2IOBYVVNL1KZIGRVZNN4LFN
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h30m03s.93
RA (top/left)	13h27m55s.66
RA (top/right)	13h31m59s.40
RA (bottom/right)	13h32m13s.76
RA (bottom/left)	13h28m07s.55

Dec (center)	+47°13′43″.5
Dec (top/left)	+47°00′09″.7
Dec (top/right)	+46°57′07″.3
Dec (bottom/right)	+47°27′07″.4
Dec (bottom/left)	+47°30′09″.7

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M51 in LLRGB

Revision title: Reprocessed in Siril with AI gradient reduction, sharpening and star resynthesis

M51 in LLRGB

Revision title: Reprocessed in Siril with AI gradient reduction, sharpening and star resynthesis

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M51 in LLRGB

Revision title: Reprocessed in Siril with AI gradient reduction, sharpening and star resynthesis

M51 in LLRGB

Revision title: Reprocessed in Siril with AI gradient reduction, sharpening and star resynthesis

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