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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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
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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