The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51 with its adjacent NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus.
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The Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as Messier 51 with its adjacent NGC 5194, is an interacting grand-design spiral galaxy with a Seyfert 2 active galactic nucleus. It lies in the constellation Canes Venatici, and was the first galaxy to be classified as a spiral galaxy. Its distance is estimated to be 31 million light-years away from Earth.
A work in progress. This image does not have any narrow band data added.
Exposure
282@300 sec (23.5 hours)
ISO
800
Camera
Nikon Z7 [8856 x 5504]
Optics
Skywatcher Esprit 120mm Refractor, 840 mm focal length
Filter
Clear
Guiding
Phd2 using a ZWO 224MC on an Orion 60x240mm Guide scope
Controller
Images taken using Kstars on an Odroid-N2 (Raspberry Pi clone)
Location
Lower Sackville, Nova Scotia.
Date
2021-06-21
PixInsight Processing
WeightedBatchPreprocessing Script
Dynamic Crop
Automatic Background Extractor
PhotometricColourCalibration
MultiscaleLinearTransform
HistogramTransform
CurvesTransformation
Further tweaking in ImagesPlus to remove the dust bunnies; Lightroom; Topaz DeNoise AI, Sharpen AI and GigaPixel AI.
