Another month of playing with telescopes has started to yield some reasonable results. Clear nights have been few and far between. One particularly good evening allowed me several hours of capture on the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51). The sky was mostly clear with a high altitude layer of ice crystals. This layer of crystals formed a very striking set of rings around the Moon:
 |
Canon 7D - 10mm, 30s @ f4, ISO 400
|
M51 itself is estimated to be around 23 million light years away. This means that the light captured in the image below left the galaxy during Earth's Cenozoic era. The main life forms on our planet would have been early mammals and marsupials. This plucky band of photons navigated across space for those millions of years without being bounced or absorbed by any intervening matter. After millions of years of travel they were vacuumed up by my telescope and recorded by the CCD camera... quite amazing. The DSO is actually the interaction between two galaxies which astronomers believe collided about 500 million years ago.
The image is composed of 3 sets of light frames. Luminance data was collected with 500s exposures and RGB data was collected in 250s (2x2 binned) exposures. This is quite a small stack, so there isn't much detail and a lot of residual noise. I intend to add more light frames to this image when conditions permit.
 |
M51 (NGC 5194 & NGC 5195) - Whirlpool Galaxy
3xLRGB stack, Atik 314L+, Celestron 925 @ f6.3
|
