Messier 51: The Whirlpool Galaxy (Jake McLerran)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4278 · M 51 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · Whirlpool Galaxy

Messier 51: The Whirlpool Galaxy, Jake McLerran

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Messier 51: The Whirlpool Galaxy

This ones a really fun target but I struggled a lot with framing. My mount doesn't like to track very well in the cold and so I was constantly having to fix the framing. Plus in my intended frame there were no real bright reference stars to help me. So I was shooting pretty much fully blind because Whirlpool appeared completely invisible under the high light pollution and seeing conditions I was shooting in. Luckily it was still in frame after stacking (barley) and the image still turned out great. One thing that this picture in particular is causing me to notice is that my images often fail to portray much depth or saturation. They almost look more like paintings than photographs which kind of bugs me. Now I'm relatively uneducated in the hobby but my guess is that it is simply my camera. This thing is literally 15 years old and most smart phones have like triple the resolution it does. As I get better I suspect that will help a bit but I do want to get to the bottom of this. I'm still really happy with turned it out and although the core is a little bit overblown I really really love the detail in the spiral structure that I know a lot of people struggle with when shooting Whirlpool.

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7882939
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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