Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  IC 4263  ·  IC 4277  ·  IC 4278  ·  M 51  ·  NGC 5194  ·  NGC 5195  ·  PGC 2289565  ·  PGC 2292105  ·  PGC 2294282  ·  PGC 2297311  ·  Whirlpool Galaxy
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin
Powered byPixInsight

Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood

Revision title: Refined wavelet sharpening - wider view

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin
Powered byPixInsight

Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood

Revision title: Refined wavelet sharpening - wider view

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

This is 10 hours of 5 minute exposures across three nights on Messier 51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) and the neighborhood. I was very happy to have caught a few nearby galaxies, particularly IC4263 (a barred spiral galaxy viewed nearly edge-on at lower left) and IC4277 (just up and right of the dwarf galaxy). If you look closer, there are several more distant galaxies with PGC designations. 

This is my first DSO experiment with wavelet sharpening, with our old friend Registax. To load in Registax, I had to crop to max dimension of 4000 pixels and reduce bit depth to 8 bpp, but it was well worth the trouble! Image B shows the best effort result prior to wavelet sharpening. In particular, this really brought out the fine dust details. Look towards the bottom of the interacting dwarf galaxy (51b) to see some very faint dust detail that I generally don't see captured in this target. 

Image C shows a more traditional zoom / crop focusing in Messier 51 and its interacting dwarf galaxy Messier 51b. A decent amount of the tidal bridge linking these galaxies can be seen.

Comments

Revisions

  • Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin
    Original
  • Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin
    B
  • Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin
    C
  • Final
    Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin
    D
  • Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin
    E

B

Title: Same image without registax wavelet sharpening

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: Closer zoom on Messier 51a and 51b

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: Refined wavelet sharpening - wider view

Uploaded: ...

E

Title: Refined wavelets - zoomed view

Uploaded: ...

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

Messier 51 Whirlpool Galaxy and Neighborhood, Paul Macklin