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| M51- The Whirlpool Galaxy |
Constellation: Canes Venatici
Distance: 23,000,000 light years
Date: 6th & 7th May 2018
Equipment: SXV-H9, Vixen 114mm f5.3 ED114 refractor, NEQ6 mount, guiding with Lodestar X2/PHD
Subframes: 50 x 200s luminance, 10 x 100s each for H-alpha, G&B (2 x 2 binned), 20 flats for each channel.Equipment: SXV-H9, Vixen 114mm f5.3 ED114 refractor, NEQ6 mount, guiding with Lodestar X2/PHD
Lurking high in the early summer sky just under the tip of the tail of the Great Bear, the twin cores of Messier 51 show up as two softly glowing points of light in my 8-inch VC200L. It takes the miracle of a CCD to allow backyard astronomers to visualise the spiral structure and wispy star trails associated with this pair of interacting galaxies. Or a large-aperture telescope...
I used H-alpha as the red channel to highlight the star-forming regions along the galaxy's spiral lanes. I have to manually refocus upon changing filters (particularly when switching from H-alpha to the RGBs) and the beefy but rather crude rack and pinion focuser on the Vixen ED114 does give rise to a fair bit of image shift. On this occasion for some reason, Astroart's co-register function subsequently struggled to line the H-alpha channel up accurately with the luminance/green/blue ones, hence some funny haloes around the stars.
But after four consecutive clear nights, sleep deprivation is starting to set in and so this one will do for now...
More about this object here...
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