I created this image for my daughter. She was exploring the meme "What's your birthday APOD". She showed me hers,
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap000724.html, and asked what I could do with this subject.
M51 or the Whirlpool Galaxy is located in Canes Venatici about 26M lightyears from earth. It is interacting with its neighbor NGC 5195. M51 is a Seyfert galaxy, meaning it has an active quasar-like nucleus powered by a supermassive blackhole. This wide field also contains many small, distant galaxies. The plate-solve highlights the four largest although there are many more if you look closely.
One of my primary goals for this rendition was to use Ha to emphasize the active star forming regions in M51's spiral arms. I used the "Continuum Subtraction" technique described by Vicent Peris and Alicia Lozano (
https://pixinsight.com/examples/M31-Ha/) to isolate the contribution of Ha emission line from the continuum emission, the light that a real world filter does not block. This allowed me to more accurately enhance the Ha emissions without also boosting the rest of the red channel.
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