This isn’t the greatest image but I wanted to post it anyway, for this winter has been tough here in New Jersey.  I was only able to capture 7 / 600 sec exposures, until the clouds rolled in and I had to call it a night.  I will revisit M51 on another night.

@Information from Sky Safari.

 [color=var(--lighterGrey)]Messier 51 (M51, NGC 5194) is the famous "Whirlpool" galaxy in Canes Venatici. It is one of the most conspicuous and best-known spiral galaxies in the sky. M 51 is interacting with its much smaller neighbor, NGC 5195; the two galaxies may be seen with binoculars under very dark skies.[/color]
M 51 is comparable to the Andromeda Galaxy (M 31) and to our own Milky Way in size, mass, and luminosity. And, like M 31 and the Milky Way, M 51 has a major satellite galaxy - NGC 5195. Visually, the two systems give the impression of being actually connected. But photographs reveal that this is not true, for they show that the dark dust lanes of the large spiral curve in front of the companion.Charles Messier discovered M 51 on 13 October 1773, and described it as a "very faint nebula, without stars". His friend Pierre Mechain discovered its companion, NGC 5195, in March 1781, and M 51 is mentioned in Messier's 1781 catalog as follows: "It is double, each has a bright center, which are separated 4' 35". The two 'atmospheres' touch each other, the one is even fainter than the other." Messier also added a sketch of the two "nebulae" in his personal copy of the catalog, confirming that he meant the designation M 51 to refer to the larger galaxy, NGC 5194. The smaller companion, NGC 5195, was later assigned its own catalog number by William Herschel: H I.186, and is also sometimes referred to as M 51B.Two supernovae have been discovered in M 51 so far: SN 1994I and SN 2005cs. From observations of the 2005 supernova, M 51's distance is estimated at 23 million light-years. With this distance, and M 51's angular diameter of 11.2', the galaxy's bright circular disk has a radius of about 38,000 light-years. It is estimated to contain 160 billion solar masses.