Wide Field Image of M51 (Steve Lantz)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: IC 4263 · IC 4278 · M 51 · NGC 5169 · NGC 5173 · NGC 5194 · NGC 5195 · NGC 5198 · NGC 5229 · Whirlpool Galaxy

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Wide Field Image of M51

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Wide Field Image of M51

On 3/8 I set up to image the Whirlpool Galaxy with my William Optics refractor. Who knew that star hopping to a galaxy would be so much harder than finding planets, the Sun and the Moon. LOL In other words, I was really rusty at finding something small and faint. After two hours of frustration, I went back to Stellarium and saw that I had misjudged where M51 is (el stupido). I put the camera in the 60 mm Solomark guidescope to get a wide field and re-attempted to locate M 51 as verified by test images. I seriously said, one more image and then I quit, and there it was, very tiny, but very welcome. It was really late, so just for the heck of it, I took 120 15 s frames through the guidescope along with dark and bias frames. The optics in the guidescope are quite mundane and the raw images had tons of flare in the corners and halos around the bright stars. So I set about using deconvolution algorithms to repair the halos and flares of the image stack to arrive at a product that with such an average, small telescope produced a fairly decent image of the galaxy in a wide field setting. It is amazing what deconvolution can do!

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Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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Star trails
Northern lights
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
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Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
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	4301971
PixInsight job	80RCXA5W2I4SLFMC49GWSVSFRFJBISB8
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	13h31m21s.61
RA (top/left)	13h22m12s.51
RA (top/right)	13h26m14s.93
RA (bottom/right)	13h40m01s.10
RA (bottom/left)	13h36m50s.22

Dec (center)	+46°49′12″.6
Dec (top/left)	+48°19′43″.3
Dec (top/right)	+44°50′53″.9
Dec (bottom/right)	+45°15′48″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	+48°46′21″.5

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Wide Field Image of M51

Wide Field Image of M51

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Wide Field Image of M51

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