"Discovered by Charles Messier in 1773, M51 is located 23 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. It has an apparent magnitude of 8.4. The Whirlpool galaxy’s beautiful face-on view and closeness to Earth allow astronomers to study a classic spiral galaxy’s structure and star-forming processes.
......, the red represents infrared light as well as hydrogen within giant star-forming regions. The blue color can be attributed to hot, young stars while the yellow color is from older stars.""The spiral galaxy's massive center, ... is about 80 light-years across and has a brightness of about 100 million suns. Astronomers estimate that it is about 400 million years old and has a mass 40 million times larger than our Sun. The concentration of stars is about 5,000 times higher than in our solar neighborhood, the Milky Way Galaxy" (
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/messier-51-the-whirlpool-galaxy )
Since we saw the images of this galaxy around, we fell in love because of its beauty and the impressive collision with another galaxy, an event that is hard to understand even looking at it in some kind of quiet order.
Maurizio began collecting data from this target as soon as we could guide properly since Dec. 2019. It Took almost a year to see the result of his effort. I'm pretty slow at processing his data I have to confess. I remember it was a nice work since I noticed the quantity of tiny galaxies around all that area in the image. I was as fascinated with them as the Whirlpool itself. The most challenging part was to pull out the faint dust that fell from the second galaxy.
The first version was finished in end Nov. 2020 and after in Dec. 2020 a version showing all the most interesting DSO in that FOV, extracting a crop detail of each one with its annotated name. It was fun doing it.
Process Nov. 2020 and Dec. 2020
https://twitter.com/AstroOtus/status/1334878692057747460https://twitter.com/AstroOtus/status/1336690625857646592
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