M51 - The Whirlpool Nebula - my second (frustrating) attempt (Cosgrove's Cosmos (Patrick Cosgrove))

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4263 · IC 4278 · M 51 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 - The Whirlpool Nebula - my second (frustrating) attempt

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M51 - The Whirlpool Nebula - my second (frustrating) attempt

M51 - The Whirlpool Galaxy. Back in October I took my first image of this galaxy, but I learned a lot since then so I wanted to give it another try. I set the equipment at 9pm last night after some late day rains and had a plan of shooting 100 two-minute exposures. I usually monitor the session with from within the house via TeamViewer but for some reason the wifi connection in the driveway was pretty bad and I kept loosing it. I went outside and checked on it periodically and things *seemed* be be going good. Around 1am I went out and did more careful check only to discover that my focus point had shifted and I had 60 images with star metrics suggesting my focus was off. ARGG! So I carefully refocused with a Bahtinov screen and got things started again. At 3am I shut things down and closed up shop for the evening. I was disappointed at losing 60 frames but I figured I still had abut 50 good frames to work with. Well it turns out that some cloud patches moved through the area during the second batch of exposures and I ended up with only 35 usable frames out of 110 taken. Ouch. So I processed those this evening and even thought the Signal-to-noise ratio was not as good as I was shooting for, the image was still a big improvement over my first one....

Shot with a WO132mm FLT APO on a IOptron CEM60 mount using a ZWO ASI294MC-Pro Camera. 50 biases, 50 flats, 25 dark calibration frames.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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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.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
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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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3570976
PixInsight job	P6B7DQF6MV49C86Q16QPEGAV9SXDD586
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	13h29m45s.57
RA (top/left)	13h27m55s.46
RA (top/right)	13h28m10s.22
RA (bottom/right)	13h31m33s.96
RA (bottom/left)	13h31m22s.58

Dec (center)	+47°12′49″.6
Dec (top/left)	+47°38′11″.10
Dec (top/right)	+46°45′52″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+46°47′20″.4
Dec (bottom/left)	+47°39′42″.6

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M51 - The Whirlpool Nebula - my second (frustrating) attempt

M51 - The Whirlpool Nebula - my second (frustrating) attempt

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M51 - The Whirlpool Nebula - my second (frustrating) attempt

M51 - The Whirlpool Nebula - my second (frustrating) attempt

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