M51 William Herschel Telescope (Nik Szymanek)

M51 William Herschel Telescope

I couldn't resist uploading this image! 🤘
Way back in 2000 I was approached by a friend who was the Public Relations Officer for the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes located at the Roque de los Muchachos observatory on La Palma, Canary Islands. He'd managed to acquire some data taken with the 4.2-metre William Herschel Telescope during the early commissioning stages of the WHT Wide Field Camera. I was a regular visitor to the Observatory back then and was asked to create a colour image of Messier 51, the Whirlpool Galaxy for public relations purposes. I had great fun doing that then but decided to revisit the data today to apply new techniques to it.
Astonishingly, the dataset was absurdly small and probably is the shortest set of deep sky FITS files combined into a colour image and shown on AstroBin!
Red: 1 x 20 seconds.
Visual: 1 x 100 seconds.
Blue: 1 x 300 seconds.
Programs that weren't around back then made short work of the dataset (Astro Pixel Processor, PixInsight and Affinity Photo) and have produced a great result for such a short set of exposures. I can only imagine what a deep dataset would have produced!
I hope you enjoy looking at this incredible data as much as I do.
Nik Szymanek

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

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
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
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.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
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	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5193014
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):