M51 from this morning

My second shot ever at a galaxy with the NS11 in pretty good seeing. I finished imaging this shot a t 5:48am this morning and I processed it just now with the sun coming in thru the window on my monitor so I reserve the right to make changes .

Details on the web site as usual:

http://web.tampabay.rr.com/jsuro/m51.htm

Best,

Jose Suro
Tierra Verde, Florida

Attached Image:

Wonderful job! You got some great detail there. There's a little noise, but it might just be exacerbated by JPG compression. Thanks!

Jose-

This is beautiful!

Can you tell me why you adjust the exposure times on the RGB instead of the number of images you add together, and how did you determine the ratio you use?

Also, after you are rested, could you give a quick recap of your processing steps?

Thanks for the help,

Steve

Wonderful shot Jose!
You are bringing in some awesome shots lately, congrats!

Wow! 8O Great stuff Jose! I really like the processing as well. I'll ditto the request for some processing info.
Cheers,
Tyler

Wow! Nice tracking, star color and detail. It looks like there may be a slight gradient on the right side. Darn moon!

Cal

Thank you all for the kind comments. As mentioned earlier, I reprocessed the image. It's a lot more subdued with less brightness and saturation to more closely match the imaging parameters. Having a Sun filled room this morning made me overprocess the image and this created some background problems, etc.

Regards,

Jose

Jose, very good! Attached is my version I took a week ago at my club's dark sky site (near Deer Trail in eastern Colorado). JMI NGT-18" f4.5 telescope with field flattner used. ST-2000XM ccd camera binned 2x2, 10:10:7:10 minute LRGB respectively. Seeing was fair, good transparency, chip temp: -25C, outside temp: 9F. Processed using both CCD_Soft and Photoshop Elements 3 with FITS liberator plug-in. Jose, I noticed that the image is backwards due to the use of the Photoshop. Flip the finished image vertical before saving to get the proper aspect.

Attached Image:

That is a great picture. I hope you don't mind if I set it as a background on my desktop. Dave

Wow, Excellent!! My only question is how long were the sub frames? I guess you really have the auto-guiding of your N11 down!
Great job,
Chris Woodruff