Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  HD117815  ·  IC 4263  ·  IC 4277  ·  IC 4278  ·  M 51  ·  NGC 5194  ·  NGC 5195  ·  Whirlpool Galaxy
Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023, Fabian Butkovich
Powered byPixInsight

M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023, Fabian Butkovich
Powered byPixInsight

M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

Easily my best astrophotograph to date! partly because of the shear amount of integration time I have on this deep sky object. Over the month of April I've been able to capture 24hrs worth of subframes on M51, however, even after manually sifting through all of them to remove images with poor guiding artifacts and star eccentricity, Deep Sky Stacker would only stack 18hrs worth of data. I employed the arcsinh curve method to create a stretched version of the stacked image, then used StarXterminator to blend a starless version on top of a flat-corrected + non-bloated stars base layer. My initial image was pretty soft in focus, however, I actually discovered a neat alternative to BlurXterminator (since it's not available for photoshop) using the high-pass filter with an layer mask. 

I'm overally very pleased with the nebulosity in the upper arm that I was able to pickup as this is very hard to capture.

Comments

Revisions

  • M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023, Fabian Butkovich
    Original
  • M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023, Fabian Butkovich
    B
  • Final
    M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023, Fabian Butkovich
    C

B

Title: Improved Internal Galaxy Stars/Subgalaxies

Description: I realized that through processing and creating a starless blend, the internal stars/sub-galaxies has disappeared from the nebulosity in M51, so I stretched the star layer a bit to reveal them.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: June rework, used a mask to correct the color to blue around the central galaxy core, cooler colour temp sky, less bloated stars, flatter field.

Uploaded: ...

Sky plot

Sky plot

Histogram

M51 (Whirlpool Galaxy) April 2023, Fabian Butkovich