M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy (Pete Mumbower)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4263 · IC 4277 · IC 4278 · M 51 · NGC 2956 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy

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M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy

Seems with every new setup I image this showcase object. Lately I have been getting some clear skies, but with summer nearly here and short nights the total time on objects plummets for me. So in that tradition, I spent two entire nights working on this, first night was Luminance and the second was the RGB data. I probably will go after some H-alpha data as the moon comes into play, but for now I am really happy with how this turned out.

For processing I took a simpler approach in PI and looked to lean on the quality data instead of NR or decon. My best Lum sub came in at 1.90 FWHM with most in the 2.1-2.3 range. I did a tiny amount of unsharpmask with that stack to give it a little bit of snap. I made use of ArcinhStretch for both the Lum and RGB and that did a superb job here. No NR on the Lum. Then I turned to the RGB with a really basic process of PCC, some MLT for noise in the background these shorter stacks presented, then a couple of passes with ArcinhStetch before moving this into the final LRGBcombination, some curve adjustments and finally the lightest of NR.

Again, really pleased with this and how my experience using the 12"f/4 is increasing and producing good results.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5820013
PixInsight job	IJCH4N7QEAF29A79TKB0M5QF3Z283GWL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h29m51s.549
RA (top/left)	13h31m17s.700
RA (top/right)	13h31m29s.228
RA (bottom/right)	13h28m24s.537
RA (bottom/left)	13h28m15s.188

Dec (center)	+47°11′46″.61
Dec (top/left)	+46°47′58″.70
Dec (top/right)	+47°34′17″.30
Dec (bottom/right)	+47°35′30″.84
Dec (bottom/left)	+46°49′10″.30

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M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy

M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy

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Image Index:

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M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy

M51 - Whirlpool Galaxy

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