M51 - 15th & 16th April 2010 data.

M51 - 11th & 15th April 2010 data.

1 Hour 3 minutes of data. 3 Minutes subs, darks, bias and flats applied.
Current scope setup at the bottom.

Below is 3 Hours 27 Minutes; 8th, 11th and 15th April data combined.

M51 - 11th April 2010

I went out the other night to collect some more data for M51. The only problem was that it clouded over after only six frames worth. Although I did use longer exposures than earlier and increased the time from 2 to 3 minutes.
I thought I'd process the six frames anyway... and here it is. 18 minutes worth, looks promising. (I also realised that one of the custom settings was turned on by mistake the other day).
As I had everything setup it wasn't a total waste because I did produce 30 dark frames, whilst it was cloudy.
Good seeing as well :-/

M51 - 8th April 2010

Last night was nice and clear, so here is 2hours 24min of M51 from last night.
C9.25 at prime focus, using the Tak for PHD guiding.
Two versions and a starless one at the bottom.

Jupiter, Mars & M51 from HST data.

Jupiter from 1995:-




The image of M51 is from a 1.2GB FITS file :-o

(C) Hubble Legacy Archive

M31 ...and others - processed with Noel's actions.

Been playing ...I bought a copy of Noel Carboni's Astronomy Tools today for Photoshop.
I'm still getting my head around them, but they're easy to use, and I can highly recommend them.

The actions used above are; Light pollution removal, Make stars smaller, Increase star color, Soft color gradient removal and a small amount of Star diffraction spikes (not really visible in this image).
Warning: Be prepared for loads of pretty pictures with star spikes all over them ;-)
Like these... hehe.

M51 re-processed from earlier this year.

M51 combined images from 24th April & 7th May 2008

Here's the combined images of M51 taken in April and the ones from last night. Processed in DSS. It's getting there... wonder what it would look like with 2 hours of subs :-)

Ah ha... a clear night at last. M51

It's been ages since I've been out, so I thought I'd have another go at M51, this time at prime focus.
Bit grainy, I think I needed more subs, but I'm fairly pleased.
The scope was guided again by my Heath Robinson 200mm telephoto lens and DMK camera through a 2.5x Powermate. Seemed to work, although it took ages to setup.
I learned a little trick in Deepskystacker, that is to lower the 'Star detection threshold' to 2%, otherwise at the normal 10% it was only stacking 1 frame! which is not much use. Still learning.

Below is a single sub frame. (RAW converted to JPEG).

M51 - 8th April Jpeg subs

I took 14 jpg subs of M51 before I realised that I should have been shooting RAW format. Here they are after being run through Registax... waste not, want not!
M51 is really tricky to find, it's so faint.

M51 - 8th April 2008

The seeing wasn't that good, but it was good practise. 22 x 1 minute guided subs.
DeepSkyStacker image.





Dual processing in DeepSkyStacker, it's really fast :-0

M51 test image.

Here's a test image of M51 using my new home made auto-guiding technique. It was produced from 8 x 1 minute exposures. No flats, darks or biases. Not very good seeing, not very dark either. Looks promising though, all I need are some nice clear dark nights and about 100 more exposures ;-)

Here's the real thing from Hubble.