M51 Whirlpool Galaxy (Joe Niemeyer)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4277 · M 51 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

This is my image of the majestic Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51. Like the Pinwheel Galaxy, it is located high in the northeastern sky in the Spring. But this galaxy is above the Big Dipper's final handle star, Alkaid. You can clearly see the gas, stars, and dust lanes in the graceful arcs of its spiral arms. And it's amazing to think that the light in this image left M51 on its way to Earth over 31 million years ago, all to end up in my telescope. The bright blob to the left of M51 is a cute little companion galaxy known as NGC 5195. Hubble images show that it is slowly passing behind M51, triggering new star formation as it tugs on one of M51's spiral arms.

This image is a stack of thirty 180-second ISO 3200 exposures at 2350mm focal length, calibrated with 10 dark frames, 20 bias frames, 20 flat frames. I did intermediate processing again with StarNet++ and then processed the foreground stars and galaxy separately in Photoshop.

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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

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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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Northern lights
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	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.

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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	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4504160
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 Whirlpool Galaxy

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